FOR THE discerning timekeeper, only an atomic clock will do. Whereas the best quartz timepieces will lose a millisecond every six weeks, an atomic clock might not lose a thousandth of one in a ...

Insanely precise atomic clocks are letting astrophysicists image black holes, steer spacecraft, and maybe one day hunt for gravitational waves.

A newly-designed atomic clock uses entangled atoms to keep time even more precisely than its state-of-the-art counterparts. The design could help scientists detect dark matter and study gravity ...

The new clock is so reliable that it would be off by less than a second if it had started running 100 million years ago, researchers say.

So, Burt says, atomic clocks pair an oscillator with a collection of atoms to help keep that frequency stable. (This clock uses mercury, but others have used cesium, rubidium, or strontium.) ...

A group of scientists from Boulder, Colo., compared three different atomic clocks. It's a step toward redefining the length of a second.

A proposed network of atomic clocks—using non-local entangled states—could achieve unprecedented stability and accuracy in time-keeping, as well as being secure against internal or external ...

The Deep Space Atomic Clock won't be subject to such environmental changes, according to NASA, and so will be 50 times more stable than the clocks used on GPS satellites.

The laser, which was phase-locked to a specially designed Fabry–Perot cavity, could measure electronic transitions extremely precisely but the researchers had only a single atomic clock at the time, ...

Currently, most terrestrial atomic clocks are the size of a refrigerator. Enter the Deep Space Atomic Clock, which NASA engineers have been tinkering with for almost 20 years.