2/28/2024 0 Comments Deep space atomic clockImportance of accurate timekeeping increases as distances grow.Īubin notes that the lab receives funding from the Virginia Space Sent and received between your car and a set of satellites. ForĮxample, your dashboard GPS works by measuring the time between signals Aubin expects the mutually repellentįermions will minimize collisions between the particles-and increaseĪccurate timekeeping is important to a number of applications. To make a smaller clock, Aubin hopes to use fermions, particles withĪn inherent repulsive nature. Ultra-cold atoms can have fewer yet but there’sĪ trade off, because trapping ultra-cold atoms concentrates their Room-temperature atoms they make better atomic clocks because they haveįewer colliding atoms. Shifts,” are responsible for that one second of drift every billionĪubin explains that traditional atomic clocks send a fountain of coldĪtoms into the air, while an ultracold atom clock uses a magnetic trap Aubin explains that all atomsĭisplay an internal waviness. Gvakharia’s atomic clock is one of several spin-offs coming from theĪubin’s lab’s investigation of cold atoms. Seth Aubin hopes to show in principle that a cold-atom atomic clock can be made much smaller, while limiting trade-offs in accuracy. Timepieces are big and need at least a meter of vertical room. While today’s bestĪtomic clocks are accurate to within a second every billion years, such Measurement of time,” explains Sandro Gvakharia ’12, who is constructingĪn atomic clock as part of his senior honors thesis. The frequency of this radiation can be used for “The electrons of atoms absorb and release radiation as they undergo "That's really significant for a lot of real-world applications, where our laser looks a lot more like what you would take out into the field.The oscillations inside of an atom are more regular than a pendulum-or virtually anything else. "The amazing thing is that we demonstrated similar performance as the JILA group despite the fact that we're using an orders of magnitude worse laser," says Shimon Kolkowitz, a UW-Madison physics professor and senior author of the study. But the UW-Madison physicists also notes the laser they used is of a much lower quality than the one used by JILA. While the atomic clock created at University of Wisconsin-Madison is precise to the point of "losing just one second every 300 billion years," the physicists say it isn't as precise as the model developed by the JILA team. Physicists at University of Wisconsin-Madison have built their own version of a highly functional atomic clock. However, the research from JILA is only one of two papers on a new atomic clock model that will be published in the February edition of Nature. "For timekeeping, it also shows that there is no roadblock to making clocks 50 times more precise than today - which is fantastic news." "The most important and exciting result is that we can potentially connect quantum physics with gravity, for example, probing complex physics when particles are distributed at different locations in the curved space-time," NIST/JILA Fellow Jun Ye said in a statement. The JILA physicists who conducted the experiment are looking to use the new model for cutting-edge experiments in understanding curved space-time, a concept pioneered by Albert Einstein in his 1915 theory of relativity.
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