WASHINGTON: US Physicists have built the world’s most accurate timepiece, based on an advanced version of an experimental atomic clock relying on a single aluminium atom.
It is more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom. The new aluminium clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measurements.
The new clock is the second version of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ‘quantum logic clock,’ because it borrows the logical processing used for atoms storing data in experimental quantum computing.
‘This paper is a milestone for atomic clocks’ for a number of reasons, says NIST postdoctoral researcher James Chou, who developed most of the improvements.
In addition to demonstrating that aluminium is now a better timekeeper than mercury, the latest results confirm that optical clocks are widening their lead – in some respects – over the NIST-F1 caesium fountain clock, the US civilian time standard, which currently keeps time to within one second in about 100 million years.
Because the international definition of the second (in the International System of Units, or SI) is based on the caesium atom, caesium remains the ‘ruler’ for official timekeeping, and no clock can be more accurate than caesium-based standards such as NIST-F1.
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