Ytterbium

Atomic clocks are our most precise timekeepers, with the best ones keeping time to within one second in 15 billion years. But there’s always room for improvement, as researchers at MIT have now demonstrated with a new quantum-entangled atomic clock.

In recent tests run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), experimental atomic clocks have achieved record performance in three metrics, meaning these clocks could help measure the Earth’s gravity more precisely or detect elusive dark matter.

Scientists have set a new world record for atomic clock stability using a pair of ytterbium-based timepieces stable down to quintillionths of a second. The researchers believe that their new system may prove invaluable in determining the precision of fundamental universal constants.

Researchers at Griffith University have taken the image of the shadow of a single ytterbium atom, paving the way to important advances in absorption imaging.

Technically no clock can be more accurate than cesium standards such as NIST-F1, but researchers have developed an experimental atomic clock based on ytterbium atoms that boasts precision comparable to that of NIST-F1.