“Optical lattice atomic clock are already the best clocks in the world, and here we get this level of performance that no one has seen before,” Shimon Kolkowitz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison physics professor and senior author of the study, said in a statement. “We’re working to both improve their performance and to develop emerging applications that are enabled by this improved performance.”
The international team, which included Jan W. Thomsen, a nuclear physicist and visiting professor from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, applied new techniques that resulted in an enhanced strontium atomic clock that would neither gain nor lose one second in more than 300 million years.
Generally speaking, atomic clocks are clocks that track the resonances of atom frequencies, usually the atoms of cesium or rubidium. This process allows such atomic clocks to measure time with a high degree of accuracy. NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is an example of a space-based experiment, which tested the technology in orbit for two years.
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Atomic clocks work by tracking the energy levels of electrons. “When an electron changes energy levels, it absorbs or emits light with a frequency that is identical for all atoms of a particular element,” the university explained in the same statement. “Optical atomic clocks keep time by using a laser that is tuned to precisely match this frequency, and they require some of the world’s most sophisticated lasers to keep accurate time.”
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The new study created a multiplexed atomic clock, which separated strontium atoms into a line in a single vacuum chamber. The team used a “relatively lousy laser,” as Kolkowitz called it, that still managed to produce near world record levels of precision in measurement.
So how did the team at JILA boost the atomic clocks accuracy? According to a press release from the NIST, the physicists had to get a grip on colliding fermions (i.e. collection of identical strontium atoms), which are used for the new breed of atomic clocks because they are not supposed to interact according to the theory of physics of quantum mechanics.
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Yet they did, as it turned out, and the researchers started to measure and control the ‘seemingly forbidden collisions’ between neutral strontium atoms.
If they shone the laser on only a single clock, the laser excited electrons in the same number of atoms for only one-tenth of a second. But with two atomic clocks at the same time, the atoms stayed excited for 26 seconds.
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The result is one of the world’s most accurate devices for measuring scientific time. But according to the NIST, the research yields additional benefits: “The high precision of JILA’s strontium lattice experimental setup is expected to be useful in other applications requiring exquisite control of atoms, such as quantum computing—potentially ultra-powerful computers based on quantum physics—and simulations to improve understanding of other quantum phenomena such as superconductivity.”
So how did the team at JILA boost the atomic clocks accuracy? According to a press release from the NIST, the physicists had to get a grip on colliding fermions (i.e. collection of identical strontium atoms), which are used for the new breed of atomic clocks because they are not supposed to interact according to the theory of physics of quantum mechanics.
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Yet they did, as it turned out, and the researchers started to measure and control the ‘seemingly forbidden collisions’ between neutral strontium atoms.
If they shone the laser on only a single clock, the laser excited electrons in the same number of atoms for only one-tenth of a second. But with two atomic clocks at the same time, the atoms stayed excited for 26 seconds.
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The result is one of the world’s most accurate devices for measuring scientific time. But according to the NIST, the research yields additional benefits: “The high precision of JILA’s strontium lattice experimental setup is expected to be useful in other applications requiring exquisite control of atoms, such as quantum computing—potentially ultra-powerful computers based on quantum physics—and simulations to improve understanding of other quantum phenomena such as superconductivity.”
“Normally, our laser would limit the performance of these atomic clocks,” Kolkowitz said. “But because the atomic clocks are in the same environment and experience the exact same laser light, the effect of the laser drops out completely.”
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Ultimately, the researchers detected a difference in the ticking rate between two atomic clocks “that would correspond to them disagreeing with each other by only one second every 300 billion years — a measurement of precision timekeeping that sets a world record for two spatially separated atomic clocks,” the university said.
