Ekkehard Peik is a clock-maker. However as an alternative of spending his days taking a look at tiny cogs and comes via a magnifying glass, the instruments of his commerce are highly effective lasers, wires and, sometimes, radioactive atoms. Peik, director of the German metrology institute (PTB), is considered one of a handful of physicists who’ve spent one of the best a part of three a long time attempting to take advantage of correct timepiece within the universe.
For the reason that Nineteen Fifties, researchers have been setting up atomic clocks, the easiest of which at the moment are so correct they solely lose a second in round 31 billion years. However these are about to get replaced by a brand new mannequin: the nuclear clock.
This guarantees to outperform its atomic counterparts each by way 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? As a result of it will likely be used for one thing rather more thrilling than merely telling the time. Nuclear clocks may assist probe a number of the deepest mysteries of the universe, together with the character of darkish matter and a number of the elusive basic forces that form our cosmos.
The tick of at the moment’s atomic clocks is the results of electrons that oscillate between a pair of shells across the nucleus of an atom. The transitions between these shells are pushed by shining lasers on the atoms concerned at simply the appropriate frequency to match that of the oscillations, a state that is named resonance. This resonant frequency, the variety of oscillations of sunshine per second, units the…
