Nuclear Clock Breakthrough Promises Near-Timeless Accuracy
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Set your watches! Scientists have set the clock ticking for the development of a new generation of timepieces with accuracy of up to 1 second in 300 billion years or about 22 times the age of the universe.
Researchers working at European XFEL X-ray have examined the potential of scandium as the basis for nuclear clocks, long seen as the next step forward in accuracy over the current generation of atomic clocks.
Most atomic clocks rely on oscillators such as caesium, which can oscillate at very reliable frequencies when excited by microwave radiation. For example, the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology's NIST-F2 clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 300 million years.
But scientists have held the ambition of going one step further by using the oscillation of the atomic nucleus - rather than the electron shell - to create the next level in timekeeping.
[...] Ralf Rohlsberger, researcher at Germany's Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, was part of the team. He said the level of accuracy possible from a nuclear clock using scandium could be equivalent to one second in 300 billion years, according to a statement.
In other words, if your watch loses a second a year, it will be 9,512 years slow by the time a nuclear clock based on scandium is a second out.
Journal Reference:
Shvyd'ko, Y., Rohlsberger, R., Kocharovskaya, O. et al. Resonant X-ray excitation of the nuclear clock isomer 45Sc [open]. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06491-w
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