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from the 108-kg-would-pay-off-US-national-debt dept.
A company is starting to sell customized buckyballs (endohedral fullerenes) on the order of micrograms:
Designer Carbon Materials, an Oxford-based scientific startup, has recently sold its first 200 micrograms of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerenes for £22,000 ($33,400)—or about £110 million ($167 million) per gram. This valuation likely makes the material the second most valuable on Earth, preceded only by antimatter, which is estimated by NASA to cost some £41 trillion per gram.
The material, which essentially is a cage of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom inside, could be used for very small and very accurate atomic clocks, which are currently of the size of a room. "Imagine a minaturised atomic clock that you could carry around in your smartphone," the company's founder Dr. Kyriakos Porfyrakis told The Telegraph. "This is the next revolution for mobile."
[...] These caged molecules have greatly enhanced physical and electronic properties compared to "normal" ones. In case of N@C60 (i.e. nitrogen atom-based endofullerenes), the "super power" is a long electron spin lifetime.
The research of one of the most expensive materials on Earth hasn't been cheap, either. In 2013, Oxford University together with two partners received a £1.5 million research grant to develop manufacturing methods "for increasing the production of endohedral fullerenes to the gram scale."
[...] At the moment, Designer Carbon Materials can produce "up to half a gram a day" of cheaper and lower-purity material, which means that there will be more empty carbon cages than those with a nitrogen atom inside. "As for the higher-purity material, we can make 50 milligrams of it, and that would take us weeks to purify," said Porfyrakis.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday December 13 2015, @10:17AM
That is a very good University Entrance interview question for physicists.
...who, besides scientists, really needs their own atomic clock?
...on the consumer level, what good is it?
Is there a common application that can benefit from this?
If you have two of them, you can determine the local relative curvature of space-time between them. So what? Well, clocks run more slowly the closer they are to large bodies due to gravitational effects ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation [wikipedia.org] ), so if you have a pair of very accurate clocks, you can determine your altitude (mostly) independent of atmospheric pressure.
If you have a fixed radio transmitter that broadcasts at a very stable fixed frequency (which is aided by having an accurate clock), you can determine your speed relative to the transmitter to a very high degree of accuracy.
Now clock-makers will also be quick to point out that you can have clocks that are short term accurate, but long-term unstable, and vice-versa, and I would imagine that these would be short term accurate clocks. But still useful.
See also this, from http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/chipscale-atomic-clock [ieee.org] which refers to a different chip-scale atomic clock.
"Another potentially important application is in undersea oil and gas exploration. When prospecting beneath the ocean, gas companies lay out a grid of sound and motion sensors on the ocean floor. A boat on the surface blasts pulses of sound through the water into the earth below. The pulse reflects off the different layers of sediment and rock, and the sensors time-stamp the echoes using a hyperaccurate built-in clock. The processed data allows engineers to construct a picture of the composition of the layers beneath the ocean floor. The quality of that picture depends on how accurate the time-stamping is. Symmetricom’s chip-scale atomic clock would improve that accuracy by 10 to 30 times and consume only 20 percent of the power drawn by the oven-controlled crystal oscillators typically used in this application, says Fossi."
Or here: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/miniclock.cfm [nist.gov]
"Chip-scale atomic clocks have many potential uses. In wireless communications devices, these clocks could improve network synchronization and channel selection to enhance security and anti-jamming capabilities. In Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, small clocks could improve the precision of satellite-based navigation systems such as those used in commercial and military vehicles and emergency response networks. In addition, as atomic clocks get smaller and cheaper and use less power, they could replace quartz crystal oscillators in many common products such as computers, offering several orders of magnitude better time keeping."