Relativistic spacetime crystals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new formalism called renormalized blended spacetime (RBS) to describe relativistic spacetime crystals, revealing symmetries and structures not evident in traditional Minkowski spacetime, and provides tools for visualizing these geometries.

Contribution

It establishes an equivalence between Minkowski spacetime and RBS, and develops a framework to classify and analyze relativistic spacetime crystals with novel symmetries.

Findings

RBS point and space groups are enumerated in various dimensions.

RBS symmetries include color spacetime groups with antisymmetry operations.

Mathematica scripts are provided for visualizing the geometries.

Abstract

Periodic space crystals are well established and widely used in physical sciences. Time crystals have been increasingly explored more recently, where time is disconnected from space. Periodic relativistic spacetime crystals on the other hand need to account for the mixing of space and time in special relativity through Lorentz transformation, and have been listed only in 2-dimensions. This work shows that there exists a transformation between the conventional Minkowski spacetime (MS) and what is referred to here as renormalized blended spacetime (RBS); they are shown to be equivalent descriptions of relativistic physics in flat spacetime. There are two elements to this reformulation of MS, namely, blending and renormalization. One can now enumerate the RBS point and space groups in various dimensions with their mapping to the well-known space crystal groups. The RBS point group for flat isotropic RBS spacetime is identified to be that of cylinders in various dimensions. An antisymmetry operation is introduced that can swap between space-like and time-like directions, leading to color spacetime groups. The formalism reveals RBS symmetries that are not readily apparent in the conventional MS formulation. Mathematica(R) script is provided for plotting the MS and RBS geometries discussed in the work.