Atomic clocks are the basis upon which a second is defined. But there is a new kid on the block, the optical clock, which ...

Precision time is ubiquitous today thanks to GPS and WWVB. Even your Macbook or smartphone displays time which is synchronized to the NIST-F1 clock, a cesium fountain atomic clock (aka the ...

The size, power, and other metrics of a latest-generation chip-scale atomic clock.

We normally think of atomic clocks as the gold standard in timekeeping. The very definition of a second — in modern times, at least — is 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to ...

Optical lattice clocks, the pinnacle of timekeeping, are key to exploring the relationship between quantum mechanics and ...

In 2001, Japanese physicist Hidetoshi Katori proposed a new type of atomic clock that only loses a second every 30 billion years, a period longer than the current age of the universe. The ...