Which atomic clocks are best? The first time zone, Greenwich Mean Time, was established in the late 1600s to assist sailors before the invention of the train and railway in the mid-1800s expanded the ...

For many years, cesium atomic clocks have been reliably keeping time around the world. But the future belongs to even more accurate clocks: optical atomic clocks. In a few years' time, they could ...

Atomic clocks. They almost sound like something out of science fiction, or an experiment confined to some elite physics lab, but in reality, they’ve been around since the 1950s in one form or another.

An international research team has taken a decisive step toward a new generation of atomic clocks. At the European XFEL X-ray laser, the researchers have created a much more precise pulse generator ...

An extremely cold gas of strontium atoms is trapped in a web of light known as an optical lattice. The atoms are held in an ultrahigh-vacuum environment, which means there is almost no air or other ...

There are significantly different architectures for what are known as “atomic” clocks. Optically driven atomic clocks offer a new set of performance attributes. The optical atomic clocks use paired ...