NIST: aluminum atomic clock rivals Mercury Ion clock in accuracy

For the socialites, telling another the time just boils down to how much bling factor your watch flashes. But for the techie in some of us, it’s not about the shimmer and pizazz – it’s how pretty darned accurate your chronometer’s counting the seconds passed. Researchers from the National Institute of Science and Technology have claimed they’ve got a pair of clocks using ions and optics, and they’re both way up there in terms of accurate timekeeping.

While on a continued experiment to observe the variable changes to some of the universe’s fundamental constants, researchers of National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) had been keeping the frequencies of their most accurate clocks in record accuracies.

During the course of their experiment, it dawned on them that the “quantum atomic clock” they’ve been using in the experiment gained significant accuracy compared to the Mercury Ion clock – currently the world’s most accurate clock.

The scientists claim that either clock can keep accurate time measurements to up to 1 billion years. That’s way beyond the NIST’s F1 clock, based on a uncharged cesium atom, which can maintain accurate time until approximately 80 million years. Either ion clock, however, bests the NIST-F1’s accuracy by as much as ten-fold.

This is due to the fact that both the mercury and aluminum clocks are based on their ionic vibrations’ optical frequencies, and not the microwave frequencies of the U.S. standard time keeper. The frequencies of both ion clocks climb to rates as high as 100,000 times that of the NIST-F1. Till Rosenband, the creator of the aluminum clock, was happy to say:

The aluminum clock is very accurate because it is insensitive to background magnetic and electric fields, and also to temperature. It has the lowest known sensitivity of any atomic clock to temperature, which is one of the most difficult uncertainties to calibrate.

Developments into the NIST’s continuing research has been published on a recent issue of Science Express, though the race continues around the world to create a clock to be accepted as the new international standard. More developments on this as we get them.

Image courtesy of Geoffrey Wheeler.