Friday, August 23, 2013



Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have claimed that the ultra-stable ytterbium lattice atomic clock is the world’s most precise clock.

Image: Telegraph
The U.S. scientists claim that the clock boasts a ticking rate that varies less than two parts in one quintillion, 10 times better than the current most accurate ones.

Instead of the pendulum that is employed in the traditional mechanical clocks, the atomic clocks use an electromagnetic signal of light emitted at an exact frequency to move electrons in caesium atoms.
10,000 rare atoms cooled to 10 microkelvin and trapped in an optical lattice made of laser light was used to make the ytterbium clocks.
Another laser reportedly ticks 518 trillion times per second to trigger a transition between two energy levels in the atoms. The clock’s stability has been credited to the large number of atoms.
It has been claimed that ytterbium clocks can achieve its best performance every second compared to the NIST-F1 caesium fountain clock that average 400,000 seconds (about five days) to achieve its best performance.
The physicists have claimed that the element, ytterbium could be useful for other technologies apart from keeping time. They claim it could be useful in navigation systems, magnetic fields and temperature.
The stability of the ytterbium lattice clocks opens the door to a number of exciting practical applications of high-performance timekeeping,” NIST physicist, and co-author of the study revealing the clock, Andrew Ludlow said in a statement.
The study was published in the journal Science.
Source: Telegraph

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