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BOULDER, Colo.Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world's most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom.
The new aluminum clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measurements to be reported in Physical Review Letters.*
The new clock is the second version of NIST's "quantum logic clock," so called because it borrows the logical processing used for atoms storing data in experimental quantum computing, another major focus of the same NIST research group. (The logic process is described at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/logic_clock/logic_clock.html#background.) The second version of the logic clock offers more than twice the precision of the original.
"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 aluminum is now a better timekeeper than mercury, the latest results confirm that optical clocks are widening their leadin some respectsover the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, the U.S. civilian time standard, which currently keeps time to within 1 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 cesium atom, cesium remains the "ruler" for official timekeeping, and no clock can be more accurate than cesium-based standards such as NIST-F1.
The logic clock is based on a single aluminum ion (electrically charged atom) trapped by electric fields and vibrating at ultraviolet light frequencies, which are 100,000 times hig
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| Contact: Laura Ost laura.ost@nist.gov 303-497-4880 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Source:Eurekalert |
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