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Got a big day planned in 15 billion years? You need this clock

You'll never be late for that special restaurant date

The world's most accurate clock has been invented, and is ideal for anyone who doesn't want to be a second late over billions and billions of years.

Boffins have improved the accuracy of the best optical atomic clock by a factor of three, so that it will not lose a second in 15 billion years – which is greater than the age of the universe.

The strontium clock was developed by physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The accuracy and stability of the improved strontium lattice optical clocks is now about 2x10-18, or the equivalent of not varying from perfect time by more than one second in 15 billion years.

The new clocks are intended as a precision measurement tools for measuring Earth tides, improving our understanding of the basic shape of the Earth (geodesy), conducting tests of the fundamental laws that govern space and time, gaining a deeper understanding the quantum world, and aiding the investigation into dark matter.

“We are walking through a portal where time itself is changing in response to changes in the shape of the Earth, and we used to think of time as a constant,” said Travis Nicholson, the lead graduate student on the project. "We were used to thinking the height of a mountain was a constant, too. All these things turn out to be a little bit fluid if your measurements are sensitive enough.”

The new strontium lattice optical atomic clock is so sensitive that it would be affected by gravitational changes due to height differences of as little as two centimeters if researchers moved it up and down in the lab.

With a clock this sensitive to small changes in gravity, the most stable clocks would need to be operated in space, far away from local variations.

However, even with slightly less stable clocks, a future co-ordinated global timekeeping network would require detailed studies of earth’s gravity field to understand local gravitational effects on network clocks across the planet.

The research was first published in the Nature Communications journal. ®

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