Latest Atomic clock Stories

The average user may not notice, but the Global Positioning System (GPS) is more reliable today than it was several years ago. Widely used by the military, first responders, surveyors and even consumers, GPS is a navigation and positioning system consisting of ground-based monitors and a constellation of satellites that rely on atomic clocks. A statistical method, developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and tested and implemented with the help of several...

Boulder, Colorado - Physicists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used the natural oscillations of two different types of charged atoms, or ions, confined together in a single trap, to produce the "ticks" that may power a future atomic clock.As reported in the July 29 issue of Science,* the unusual tandem technique involves use of a single beryllium ion to accurately sense the higher-frequency vibrations of a single aluminum ion....

NIST -- The world's most accurate "ruler" made with extreme ultraviolet light has been built and demonstrated with ultrafast laser pulses by scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder. The new device, which consistently generates pulses of light lasting just femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second, or millionths of a billionth of a second) in the ultraviolet region of the...

PARIS (AFP) -- Japanese scientists say they have made a technical breakthrough in the quest to perfect the world's most accurate clock, a timepiece that would lose only one-quintillionth (a million-million-millionth) of a second per day. University of Tokyo researcher Hidetoshi Katori and colleagues devised a "pendulum" of strontium atoms that ride on the crest of highly stable laser-generated lightwaves, according to their study, which appears on Thursday in Nature, the weekly...

Symmetricom (Nasdaq:SYMM), a leading worldwide supplier of network synchronization and timing solutions and atomic clocks, today announced that it has begun deploying Rubidium atomic clock oscillators as a critical transmitter component for the emerging Japanese Integrated Services Digital Broadcast-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) system. The rollout of ISDB-T has begun to be deployed in major metropolitan areas across Japan and will continue through 2010. The ISBD-T specification standard...