Now measure the entire life of universe accurately with ultra-precise clock

The future just got better! Some dedicated efforts from a combined team of physicists from United States and Russia saw mankind’s one of the most innovative invention, the atomic clock, get even more precise and accurate. According to a Paper presented at the 2011 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics in Baltimore, Md, scientists have worked out a way to compute even the most miniscule source of error in atomic clocks. As a consequence of this breakthrough discovery, now these clocks can attain a precision, which is equivalent to one second of error every 32 billion years, which happens to be longer than the age of universe. Quite incredible!

atomic clock

The world’s most precise atomic clock, the quantum-logic clock is based on a single aluminum ion vibrating at ultraviolet frequencies, which keeps the time from falling backwards or gaining 1 second every 3.7 billion years. However amazing it sounds, but the truth is, in order to get a better grasp of concepts related to universal physical constants and quantum physics we need to have even more accurate, precise and error-free means of measuring time.

The main challenge was to compensate for a simple phenomenon, the black body effect, which caused the electron cloud in an atom to expand, shifting the actual tick rate of the clock. Here comes into picture, University of Delaware’s Marianna Safranova , and her team of physicists at Joint Quantum Institute. Using the quantum theory of atomic structure, they computed the BBR shift of the atomic energy levels of the aluminum ion, reducing the relative uncertainty in the ion to a factor of 7 better than previous calculations. This effectively means, that the new clock would possibly allow us to test the constancy of laws of the universe for even the most exceptionally minute period of time in a far comprehensive and better way than the earlier version of this clock.

Another exciting part of this discovery is that the new improved clocks would not only become the cornerstone of space and terrestrial navigation, but also assist in precise synchronization of broadband data stream.

Via: ScienceDaily/io9