This Is The World’s Most Accurate Clock And It Doesn’t Lose A Second In 5 Billion Years
The Engineer
Time is money and well, you need to keep a track of time to be successful in life. Most of the ordinary guys like us use a wrist watch to see the time. However, what is the issue with your wrist watch? It lags or runs a little too fast, doesn’t it?
While many of us are not really bothered about this, those who are have come up with a watch that will not lose a second even in five billion years. Talk about being a perfectionist! This watch is a new atomic watch and will neither gain, nor lose a second in the next five billion years.
The clock is being called the ‘Strontium Lattice Clock’ and has an accuracy which is 50 % better than the previous World’s most accurate watch title holder – National Institute of Standards and Technology Quantum Logic Clock. The Strontium Lattice Clock is more than just being extremely stable; every tick matches the duration of the next tick and every other tick which takes place.
For those of you who are not sure how an atomic watch works, we shall enlighten you. The watch works in a simple way; atoms oscillate between different energy levels, usually two different levels. For this particular watch, they have used a few trillion atoms of strontium, which are placed in a column of laser optical traps. According to scientists, the clock’s ticking employs 430 trillions of these atoms per second and this is achieved by making use of a stable red light. The precision of the laser is crucial and it controls the time to switch between energy levels.
The clock has been featured in the journal Nature and was developed at Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), USA where a team from NIST worked in collaboration with team from University of Colorado. Dr Jun Ye, Team leader, said; ‘We already have plans to push the performance even more. So in this sense, even this new Nature paper represents only a ‘mid-term’ report. You can expect more new breakthroughs in our clocks in the next five to 10 years’
We are looking at the future readers, a future where technology will be able to accomplish all that was considered just a fantasy up till now. Amazing, Isn’t it?
