14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers with JILA, a joint research institute managed by the US National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB), announce the development of the world's most precise and stable atomic clock.
The science group was led by Jun Ye, a research fellow with both NIST and JILA. Details of the study appear in a paper published in the January 22 online issue of the top journal Nature. Funds came from NIST, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
According to statistical measurements conducted on the new atomic clock, the still-experimental device is roughly 50 percent more accurate than the quantum logic clock developed at NIST a few years back, which until now held the world record for the most precise timekeeping device ever created.
In the case of atomic clocks, precision is a measure of “how closely the clock approaches the true resonant frequency at which its reference atoms oscillate between two electronic energy levels,” a NIST press release explains. The new clock is based on strontium atoms, the JILA team adds.
Theoretical calculations indicate that this clock will fall back by a second, or gain a second, only when its operation time exceed 5 billion years. Astronomers hypothesize that the Sun will have turned into a red supergiant, and disintegrated our planet, by that time.
The stability of the strontium clock is similar to that of the ytterbium atomic clock unveiled by NIST investigators back in August 2013. All atomic clocks need to undergo a process called averaging, where the duration of each of their ticks is measured against the duration of all other ticks.
Both the strontium and ytterbium lattice clocks are capable of averaging their ticks within just a few seconds, whereas all other devices in their class need hours, or even days, to do the same.
“We already have plans to push the performance even more. So in this sense, even this new Nature paper represents only a ‘mid-term’ report. You can expect more new breakthroughs in our clocks in the next 5 to 10 years,” Ye says.
The international community currently uses the cesium atomic clock for global reference. The main timekeeping device on our planet is the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock. By definition, only cesium clocks can be accurate, but clocks based on other atoms – such as strontium and ytterbium – may one day be chosen as the new timekeeping standard.