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Physicists have said they have fine-tuned an atomic clock to the point where it won’t lose or gain a second in 15bn years – longer than the universe has existed.
The “optical lattice” clock ( http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150421/ncomms7896/full/ncomms7896.html ), which uses strontium atoms, is now three times more accurate than a year ago when it set the previous world record, its developers reported in the journal Nature Communications.
The advance brings science a step closer to replacing the current gold standard in timekeeping: the caesium fountain clock that is used to set Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the official world time.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/22/record-breaking-clock-invented-which-only-loses-a-second-in-15-billion-years
[Also Covered By]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/22/8466681/most-accurate-atomic-clock-optical-lattice-strontium
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bziman on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:23PM
That's actually the whole point. This isn't for keeping time over billions of years. It is for measuring really tiny variations in timing at different locations. Among other things, it could increase accuracy of GPS by an order of magnitude. It can also be used to help measure space time curvature and gravitation effects, which is helpful for people trying to understand the nature of the universe. The tech they are using involves holding particles in a stable but unknown quantum state, which could have applications for quantum computing.