MIT boffins double precision of atomic clocks by taming quantum noise

Researchers at MIT say they have discovered a way to double the precision of optical atomic clocks by quieting the quantum noise that clouds their ticking. Atomic clocks keep time by monitoring the natural oscillations of atoms as they move between energy states. Each atom oscillates unimaginably fast. Cesium, for instance, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the abstract on the Nature article page

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09578-8

The paper itself is paywalled but the abstract is an interesting example of an English text which is as about as inpenetrable to a layman as anything Humpty·Dumpty could have imagined.

For me it might as well have been in Linear A. There are definitely more things than are dreamt of in my philosophy. :)

[Maurice Mynah]

Re: Read the abstract on the Nature article page

Looking behind the paywall, the paper is written in the purest Boffinese.

I stand to be corrected by a Real Physicist (TM), but as far as I can make out it seems to be using the sort of spin manipulations used in NMR spectroscopy to correct for the spreading out effects due to measuring a large(ish) collection of atoms.

I never pretended to understand the details, but was impressed by an illustrative experiment: take two coaxial transparent cylinders with a thin gap between them, filled with glycerol in which you have contrived to insert a coloured stripe along the cylinder length. If you rotate one cylinder, the stripe smears out and seems to disappear. It looks like the colour has been randomly spread out around the cylinder. Now for the magic: rotate the cylinder backwards, and the stripe reappears! It's because the colour isn't randomly spread, but organised in a thin layer, a bit like sliding a deck of cards sideways. Moving the cylinder back slides the colout back into one thin band that you can see.

Happy to be laughed at by persons with better boffinry than mine.

[Fatwelshbuddha]

Re: Read the abstract on the Nature article page

“For me it might as well have been in Linear A“

Try this one then

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06137

[may_i]

Star Trek takes another step close to reality

This sounds a bit like a "Heisenberg Compensator".

[MrBanana]

Accuracy at last.

Now I don’t have to set the alarm early for 6:59 to make sure I get up exactly at 7:00:00.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[David Hicklin]

Re: Accuracy at last.

But can your arm move accurately enough to hit the snooze ?

[brainwrong]

Caesium

"Cesium, for instance, vibrates more than 10 billion times every second."

You spelt caesium wrong, and got it's frequency wrong. Whilst it probably has oscillation modes above 10GHz, the one used to define the second is 9,192,631,770 Hz.

You don't say what atom this work is based on.

[Richard Boyce]

Re: Caesium

You made a spelling error yourself. The short form of "it is" uses an apostrophe but the possessive pronoun does not.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're wasting their time (sorry)

Only realised there was an unintentional pun when I typed that :).

I don't get all this quantum stuff. We already have access to the shortest possible physical timespan: the time for an avocado to go from not yet ripe to past its prime.

I'm sure this can be turned into some kind of measurement.

:)

[I-Think-I-Done-That-Already]

Re: They're wasting their time (sorry)

And all this time I thought it was peaches...