The advantage of a radio-controlled clock that receives the time signal from WWVB is that you never have to set it again. Whether it’s a little digital job on your desk, or some big analog wall clock ...

Nuclear clocks should be more robust and portable than the best available clocks today because nuclei are hard to perturb and are protected in a crystal. Creating a nuclear clock is “a dream come ...

The time is nigh for nuclear clocks. In a first, scientists have used a tabletop laser to bump an atomic nucleus into a higher energy state. It’s a feat that sets scientists on a path toward creating ...

By using a rare thorium nucleus as a timekeeper, physicists have demonstrated the first working nuclear clock, a device that could lead to even more precise clocks and new ways to search for dark ...

Time feels familiar. It marks every moment of daily life, from the ticking of a wall clock to the changing numbers on a smartphone screen. Yet despite its constant presence, time remains one of the ...

What looks like an aerial shot of an alien landscape is actually a scanning electron microscope view of a test glass surface, acquired as part of a project to improve the lifetime of spaceborne atomic ...

Imagine you're trying to keep time by listening to a room full of people clapping. If everyone claps randomly, it’s hard to tell the rhythm. But if they clap in sync, the beat becomes clear and steady ...

There are significantly different architectures for what are known as “atomic” clocks. Optically driven atomic clocks offer a new set of performance attributes. The optical atomic clocks use paired ...

How does a clock become precise enough to guide a spacecraft across interstellar distance without drifting a single second over millions of years? Recent advances in quantum physics are pushing ...

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 ...

Researchers have shown, for the first time, that transmission of ultrastable optical signals from optical clocks across tens of kilometers of deployed multicore fiber is compatible with simultaneous ...