The most accurate atomic clock in the world can work for billions of years

The accuracy of atomic clocks - as time-stamping devices are called with absurdly high accuracy - has been improved as scientists discover new ways and technologies to make them nearly perfect. A project released by Science showed a new ultra-accurate watch created by a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

While other atoms may increase the stability of the watch, they may also decrease accuracy as they are more prone to collisions.

What the team of scientists did was to further improve the method previously used to make their atomic clock version created by them even more accurate in 2015, which was, to date, the most accurate in the world. The system called optical networks uses lasers that "quarantine" atoms individually and increase measurement accuracy, preventing them from moving and interacting with each other.

Just the same, but different

The new atomic clock does the same thing, but it amplifies this one-dimensional optical network system to the three dimensions of space. With only one dimension, the number of atoms that can be used is limited. Thus, while other atoms may increase the stability of the watch, they may also decrease the accuracy as they are more prone to collisions.

atomic clock

Atomic clocks use light to function. Using laser beams, for example, it is possible to push the electrons of an atom to higher energy positions. When these atoms move back to their lowest positions, they release light and atomic clocks can measure time by these energy position movements.

A thousand and one Utilities

A watch like this is one of the most sensitive and inquisitive instruments mankind has ever built.

To increase the number of stored atoms, it was enough to develop a three-dimensional system instead of one-dimensional, which increased the stability of the atomic clock, which in addition to marking the time, is able to help perform slightly more complex tasks such as detecting dark matter. or gravitational waves. It can also last billions of years without time changes.

"A watch like this is one of the most sensitive and inquisitive instruments mankind has ever built, " said NIST researcher Jun Ye. "We want to use it to describe the connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity, " he concluded.