A team of researchers has developed a novel method for using cholesteric liquid crystals in optical microcavities. The ...

Cesium atomic clocks are really, really good— the best of them have an uncertainty of around a part in 10 16, which is to say when it measures one second, that’s 1.0000000000000000+/-0. ...

"Many recent atomic clocks, ours included, use an 'optical' transition, where the frequency of the oscillation is similar to the frequency of visible light," Aeppli explained.

Laser-cooled atoms are trapped in the optical lattice, and the clock transition frequency is measured with high precision in a low-temperature blackbody radiation shield. view more Credit ...

The laser's 1397-nanometer wavelength is twice that of the laser used to create the most stable type of optical clock known as a strontium optical lattice clock.

The researchers use an "optical lattice," a standing wave from a laser beam that creates a sort of egg-carton shape whose wells trap the atoms. "It's almost like a science-fiction tractor beam ...

An optical lattice is essentially an artificial crystal of light – a periodic intensity pattern that is formed by the interference of two or more laser beams. The simplest optical lattice consists of ...

This week, a paper s put forth an alternative method of standardizing the second, one which reduces the variability between clocks, and has implications for increasingly precise experiments.

The experiment involves loading a square 2D optical lattice with ultracold rubidium atoms. The atoms begin in their lowest energy (ground state) and are separated by a minimum distance of 0.54 micron.

In optical lattice clocks, the oscillator is comprised of an ultra-stable laser, while the counter is a so-called frequency comb (i.e., an instrument to measure optical frequencies by recording ...

Hidetoshi Katori and Jun Ye won the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for outstanding contributions to the invention and development of the optical lattice clock, which enables ...