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 ...

Ultra precise Chinese lattice clock joins international system, challenging decades of US dominance in global timekeeping ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. MIT and Harvard scientists have built the world’s most precise optical clock, surpassing the quantum limit with entangled atoms ...

Quantum timekeeping has reached a new threshold, with trapped-ion clocks now accurate to the 19th decimal place and a ...

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, ...

The field of optical atomic clocks, in combination with ultracold atoms, has transformed precision timekeeping and metrology. By utilising laser-cooled atoms confined in optical lattices, researchers ...

The reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics is one of the biggest challenges in science, one that continues to elude us. Now, a new study by Anjun Chu and colleagues has examined ...

An extremely cold gas of strontium atoms is trapped in a web of light known as an optical lattice. The atoms are held in an ultrahigh-vacuum environment, which means there is almost no air or other ...

Dr. Ana Marie Rey, University of Colorado professor of physics and fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) Harnessing the behavior of complex systems is at the heart of ...

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.