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Update: The World's Most Precise Clock (Live Pic)


Ok, so the live photo here might not be anything like the wristshots you're used to seeing here on HODINKEE, but this is the first live photo of the world's most precise clock that we first told you about earlier this summer. Regulated by ytterbium atoms, this atomic clock at Colorado's US National Institute of Standards and Technology is so accurate that if it were to run for 100 million years it would only lose about a second. So much for that chronometer on your wrist. 

The click is accurate to one part per quintillion (the power of 10 to the 18th), making it a full order of magnitude more accurate than the best previous effort, as the NIST's Andrew Ludlow told New Scientist. These earlier clocks used atoms of an element called caesium instead of ytterbium, but scientists had pushed these atoms as far as they could go in terms of generating accuracy. Not only does speed matter with these atoms, but also consistency. The more consistent the changes in energy levels are, the more accurate the resulting clock will be.

The NIST cooled 10,000 ytterbium atoms down to thousandths of degrees Kelvin from absolute zero to stabilize them and then use lasers to create a cradle for the atoms. From here another laser measures the changes in energy levels and averages are taken to keep time. Each atoms makes about 518 trillion oscillations per second, a number that is difficult to even fathom for those interested in mechanical time keeping. 

There are two of these clocks and they were not built just for the sake of doing so. Researchers are already designing experiments in which these clocks can be used to test Einstein's theory of general relatively to unprecedented levels of accuracy. We're talking 10 parts per billion here, allowing scientists to detect different effects of gravity on objects merely a centimeter apart from one another. 

You can find both the abstract and the full scientific paper at Science Magazine.

(via Gizmodo)