Tucked away in a vault in France is a weight made of platinum and iridium, diligently cared for by a team of highly trained specialists. Its sole purpose is to be, to sit and remain unchanging as the ...

Every second of modern life runs on precision — from GPS navigation to the time signals that keep the internet in sync. But scientists at MIT and Harvard have just taken precision to an entirely new ...

A compact optical lattice clock with a volume of 250 liters has been developed. The system includes a physics package for conducting spectroscopy on the clock transition within a vacuum chamber, ...

University of Wisconsin–Madison physicists have made one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever, they announced Feb. 16 in the journal Nature. In another verification of the validity of ...

The way time is measured is on the edge of a historic upgrade. At the heart of this change is a new kind of atomic clock that uses light instead of microwaves. This shift means timekeeping could ...

Although today’s best optical atomic clocks can be used to make extremely precise measurements, they are still limited by the noise from the spin statistics of the many atoms they interrogate, known ...

The next generation of atomic clocks "ticks" at the frequency of a laser. That is around 100,000 times faster than the microwave frequencies of the caesium clocks that currently generate the second.

China’s strontium optical clock now participates directly in international atomic time calculation Optical clocks operate at higher frequencies than caesium, allowing finer measurement resolution ...

Scientists have developed an atomic clock that is more precise and accurate than any clock previously created. The new clock was built by researchers at JILA, a joint institution of the National ...