Ekkehard Peik is a clock-maker. But as an alternative of spending his days tiny cogs and comes via a magnifying glass, the instruments of his commerce are highly effective lasers, wires and, often, radioactive atoms. Peik, director of the German metrology institute (PTB), is one of a handful of physicists who’ve spent the better part of three a long time attempting to make the most correct timepiece in the universe.
Since the Fifties, researchers have been establishing atomic clocks, the highest of which are actually so correct they solely lose a second in round 31 billion years. But these are about to get replaced by a brand new mannequin: the nuclear clock.
This guarantees to outperform its atomic counterparts each in phrases of precision and accuracy. A nuclear clock would, in precept, solely drop a second each 300 billion years. Why, you may ask, would we ever want one thing with such mind-blowing precision? Because will probably be used for one thing rather more thrilling than merely telling the time. Nuclear clocks could assist probe some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, together with the nature of darkish matter and a few of the elusive basic forces that form our cosmos.
The tick of immediately’s atomic clocks is the end result of electrons that oscillate between a pair of shells round the nucleus of an atom. The transitions between these shells are pushed by shining lasers at the atoms concerned at simply the proper frequency to match that of the oscillations, a state that is called resonance. This resonant frequency, the quantity of oscillations of mild per second, units the…