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A new atomic clock is even more precise than its predecessors:
It's about time. The most precise atomic clock ever made has been created by arranging strontium atoms in a grid-like pattern and then stacking those grids like pancakes.
Most atomic clocks use atoms of the isotope caesium-133. The ticking of time is measured through microwaves emitted by the electrons around those atoms jumping from a lower to higher orbit as they absorb and then lose energy from a laser.
But these clocks are constrained in how precisely they can divide time because caesium electrons have a speed limit: they can only jump back and forth 9 billion times per second. The electrons in strontium atoms can transition nearly 1 million billion times per second.
"In 2014, the world's most accurate optical clock wouldn't lose or gain one second in the entire age of the universe," says Jun Ye at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previous caesium clocks kept time accurately to within a second over the course of 300 million years.
Now, Ye's group has built a strontium clock that is so precise, out of every 10 quintillion ticks only 3.5 would be out of sync – the first atomic clock ever to reach that level of precision.
Also at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
A Fermi-degenerate three-dimensional optical lattice clock (DOI: 10.1126/science.aam5538) (DX)
A synchronous clock comparison between two regions of the 3D lattice yields a measurement precision of 5 × 10–19 in 1 hour of averaging time.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday October 06 2017, @01:43AM (2 children)
I was about to say. The previous metric was how long it took to be off by one second. 300 million up to the "age of the universe". Then it switches to a different metric of out-of-sync-ticks with no context or explanation.
We need a Time Lord to come here and explain :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday October 06 2017, @02:05AM (1 child)
NIST says:
7200 seconds in 2 hours.
4383000000000 periods of 7200 seconds in 1 billion years.
(4383000000000 * 3.5)/(10^19) = 0.00000153405
1.5 microseconds per billion years or 1 second per roughly 651.9 trillion years.
r8 my math
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(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday October 06 2017, @02:13AM
Thank you, my lord :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.