The world keeps time with the ticks of atomic clocks, but a new type of clock under development—a nuclear clock—could revolutionize how we measure time and probe fundamental physics. An international ...

Atomic clocks. They almost sound like something out of science fiction, or an experiment confined to some elite physics lab, but in reality, they’ve been around since the 1950s in one form or another.

The heart of a minuscule atomic clock—believed to be 100 times smaller than any other atomic clock—has been demonstrated by scientists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and ...

An international research team has taken a decisive step toward a new generation of atomic clocks. The researchers have created a much more precise pulse generator based on the element scandium, which ...

Optical atomic clocks are the most accurate measuring instruments ever built and are becoming key tools for basic and applied research, for example to test the constancy of natural constants or for ...

Atoms are the world’s most precise timekeepers – so much so that the second is defined as exactly 9 192 631 770 ticks of a caesium-based atomic clock. Commercially-available versions of these ...

From freeze-dried strawberries to memory foam and scratch-resistant glasses, space exploration is the force behind a myriad of life-changing innovations. Now it’s time for a terrestrial innovation to ...

NIST scientists have published results establishing a new atomic clock, NIST-F4, as one of the world’s most accurate timekeepers, priming the clock to be recognized as a primary frequency standard — ...