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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: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Friday October 06 2017, @07:45AM
If I'd seen this yesterday, I might have said "Why?"
Then I watched a video online with the Nobel Prize winners for the measuring of gravitational waves.
Where they describe creating an interference pattern along a 4km-long-and-then-reflected path, measured down to a scale below that of the size of a neutron, looking for any change in the pattern caused by "warping" of space-time when a gravitational wave passes through the experiment.
And they were talking numbers like 10^-18/19 in terms of measurements of distance. Which must surely also mean there's a need for 10^-19 in terms of time etc. to calibrate such distances effectively.
They measured the space-time impact echoes of two black holes colliding a billion years ago and a billion light years away using a 4km long instrument accurate down to less than the size of a neutron. And they got it almost first time, unexpectedly well, completely matching the predictions of some of the most difficult to calculate equations that have taken years to solve using supercomputers.
If that doesn't make you go "Wow", then I don't know what will.