There may be a new level of accuracy in telling time. The Tokyo-based research indicates that a new clock built on the idea of measuring mercury atoms would create the most accurate clock in the world.
Current technology is over 50 years old and looses about 1 sec over 30 million years. The new technology is expected to loose only a fraction of a second over 14 billion years.
The technology has not been proven yet. The clock must run for a couple of weeks before they will know if it works as expected.
Current clocks are based on the oscillation of the metal cesium, a technology which is more than 50 years old, notes Andrei Derevianko, a professor of physics at the University of Reno and one of the new study’s authors.
The researchers propose what is called an optical lattice clock, where a set of lasers creates a wave that holds atoms of mercury at rest. Another set of lasers reads the atoms’ energy levels to determine the time.