Keeping Time with a Mercury Atom

Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced that a new experimental atomic clock based on a single mercury atom is now at least five times more precise than NIST-F1, the U.S. standard clock. This mercury atomic clock 'would neither gain nor lose a second in about 400 million years' while it would take 'only' 70 million years to NIST-F1, based on a 'fountain' of cesium atoms, to gain or lose a second. But even if this new kind of optical atomic clock is more accurate than cesium microwave clocks, it will take a while before such a design can be accepted as an international standard. A ZDNet summary contains pictures and more details about the world's most precise clock."

Comments

unfortunately

[legallyillegal]

syncing to time.singlemercuryatom.nist.gov doesn't work yet.

Re:unfortunately

[uglydog]

maybe it's been /.ed?

Great news for D-Link

[GreggBz]

Great news for those mission critical D-Link routers!

Only problem is...

[mrjb]

They're treating time as if it were something absolute.

The only problem arises...

[viking2000]

...from the Heisenberg uncertainly principle:

The more precisely
the MOMENTUM is determined,
the less precisely
the POSITION is known

So this clock is unfortunately missing. And when it is found, it is not so accurate anymore.

Re:400 million years

[Das Modell]

It's easy to make impressive statements like that when you know nobody will be around to prove you wrong!

This man begs to differ.