![]() ![]() “This means that if these clocks started running right after the Big Bang, they would have drifted less than a second in the 13.7 billion years since,” Newbury says.Ītomic clocks have many possible applications besides keeping time. Optical atomic clocks, which use intersecting laser beams to entrap and monitor the atoms, are currently accurate down to 1 attosecond, or a billionth of a billionth of a second. Whereas grandfather clocks keep time by tracking swinging pendulums, atomic clocks monitor the quantum vibrations of atoms. The new work bests current satellite state-of-the-art time synchronization by 10,000 times. ![]() ![]() “Time is the physical quantity that humans can measure with the greatest precision,” says study coauthor Nathan Newbury, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Col. These clocks would help support advanced satellite navigation and sensor networks to find everything from hidden underground structures to dark matter.Ītomic clocks are the most precise timekeepers created yet. This new study joins a range of findings over the past two decades that point toward satellite arrays of synchronized atomic clocks with femtosecond precision. By firing a laser from a volcano in Hawaii, scientists now reveal they can synchronize atomic clocks to 320 billionths of a billionth of a second (0.32 femtoseconds or 320 attoseconds) over a distance of more than 300 kilometers. ![]()
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