No, not a new clock for your digital front end (although perhaps it could be someday)


Two physicists just snagged $3 million for helping develop a super-precise clock that could allow scientists to study and explore the universe like never before.

Yatori and Ye's research was key to the creation of the optical lattice clock, which Breakthrough Prize representatives said improves timekeeping precision by a factor of 1,000. The new timepiece would lose less than 1 second if operated for 30 billion years — more than twice the age of the universe.

Optical lattice clocks are an evolutionary step beyond traditional atomic clocks, which are based on the quantum leaps made by electrons in energized atoms. Indeed, "one second" is officially defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation that gets electrons in a cesium atom to make a quantum leap.

Atomic clocks initially used microwave-frequency radiation to induce those leaps. An advance came with the substitution of optical light, which features frequencies about 100,000 times higher than microwaves. Those higher frequencies enabled greater timekeeping accuracy, just as they do in grandfather clocks with faster-swinging pendulums, Breakthrough representatives said.





Super-precise clock tech wins $3 million physics Breakthrough Prize | Live Science