New atomic clock will be so accurate after 14 BILLION years

Shafaq News/If left to run for some 14 billion years — roughly the current age of the universe — a new type of atomic clock could keep accurate time to within a tenth of a second. According to Daily Mail.

The design by US experts makes use of a bizarre phenomenon called quantum entanglements, in which particles become inextricably linked.

This entanglement, the researchers explained, helps reduce the uncertainty involved in measuring the oscillation of atoms used by atomic clocks to keep time.

The clock could be used to help reveal the elusive 'dark matter' thought to make up more than three-quarters of the universe — and to study gravity's effect on time.

'Entanglement-enhanced optical atomic clocks will have the potential to reach a better precision in one second than current state-of-the-art optical clocks,' said paper author and electrical engineer Edwin Pedrozo-Peñafiel of MIT.

Current atomic clocks take measurements from thousands of ultra-cooled atoms — which are corralled into an optical 'trap' with lasers and probed by a different laser whose frequency is similar to that of the vibrations of the atoms being measured.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature.