A transportable ytterbium optical lattice clock has been commercially shipped, rapidly recommissioned, and tested against ...

For the first time, an international team of physicists has successfully harnessed a rare orbital transition in atoms of ...

(CNN) — Picture a clock ticking so steadily that it doesn’t lose a second, even after running for 1 billion years. Scientists are now closer than ever to realizing that level of timekeeping precision, ...

Chip-scale laser controls trapped ions for quantum clocks and qubits, enabling portable, scalable systems with high fidelity ...

Atomic clocks record time using microwaves at a frequency matched to electron transitions in certain atoms. They are the basis upon which a second is defined. But there is a new kid on the block, the ...

Nuclear effect The deformed shape of the ytterbium-173 nucleus (right) makes it possible to excite the clock transition with a relatively low-power laser. The same transition is forbidden (left) if ...

For the first lecture in the Fall Physics Colloquium Series, Chuankun Zhang, a graduate student from the University of Colorado Boulder's physics department and a researcher at JILA, delivered an ...

A new atomic clock is one of the world’s best timekeepers, researchers say — and after years of development, the “fountain”-style clock is now in use helping keep official U.S. time. Known as NIST-F4, ...

Clocks are the bedrock of modern physics and technology, as they allow scientists to assess fundamental scientific theories, and they make GPS and telecommunications possible. The current gold ...