[time-nuts] Precision clock traps atoms in light to keep time - Yahoo! News

christopher hoover ch at murgatroid.com
Sun Feb 17 18:31:03 EST 2008


CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. physicists have made a clock so accurate it will
neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years, a
finding sure to please even the most punctually minded. 

The clock, described in the Friday issue of the journal Science, outperforms
the official atomic clock used by the U.S. Commerce Department's National
Institute of Standards and Technology, which promises to keep accurate time
down to the second for 80 million years.

The new atomic clock is vying for the title of world's most accurate with
another experimental clock developed in the same lab at the Joint Institute
for Laboratory Astrophysics, a collaboration between NIST and the University
of Colorado in Boulder.

"These clocks are improving so rapidly that it is impossible to tell which
one will be the best," said Tom 0'Brian, head of the Time and Frequency
Division at NIST.

[. . . link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080215/tc_nm/clock_atomic_dc_2;_ylt=AkYZENAtV97
6dJYtnSgwoMME1vAI . . . ]

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: winmail.dat
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 3977 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/attachments/20080217/4cdc07de/attachment.bin 


More information about the time-nuts mailing list