The way time is measured is on the edge of a historic upgrade. At the heart of this change is a new kind of atomic clock that uses light instead of microwaves. This shift means timekeeping could ...

Considering that 90% of American adults own mobile phones, the practice of interrupting strangers to inquire about the time has almost completely disappeared. Since these devices are so prolific in ...

A clock built by a team led by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been estimated to be 41 percent more accurate than the previous timekeeping record holder.

Atomic clocks have long been the gold standard for measuring time and frequency. Among them, optical clocks—using atoms like strontium or aluminum—have reached staggering levels of accuracy, with ...

As if timekeeping in the U.S. wasn’t already pretty accurate, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just declared a new atomic clock, the NIST-F2, to ...

At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They ...

The field of optical atomic clocks, in combination with ultracold atoms, has transformed precision timekeeping and metrology. By utilising laser-cooled atoms confined in optical lattices, researchers ...

Physicists at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics have developed a new atomic clock that is so accurate, it will not lose a second of time in more than 200 million years. That makes the ...