Nuclear clocks could be the GOAT: Greatest of all timepieces.
If physicists can build them, nuclear clocks would be a brand-new type of clock, one that would keep time based on the physics of atoms’ hearts. Today’s most precise clocks, called atomic clocks, rely on the behavior of atoms’ electrons. But a clock based on atomic nuclei could reach 10 times the precision of those atomic clocks, researchers estimate.
Better clocks could improve technologies that depend on them, such as GPS navigation, physicist Peter Thirolf said June 3 during an online meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. But “it’s not just about timekeeping.” Unlike atoms’ electrons, atomic nuclei are subject to the strong nuclear force, which holds protons and neutrons together. “A nuclear clock sees a different part of the world,” said Thirolf, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. That means nuclear clocks could allow new tests of fundamental ideas in physics, including whether supposedly immutable numbers in physics known as fundamental constants are, in fact, constant.
Atomic clocks tally time using the energy jumps of atoms’ electrons. According to quantum physics, electrons in atoms can carry only certain amounts of energy, in specific energy levels. To bump electrons in an atom from one energy level to another, an atomic clock’s atoms must be hit with laser light of just the right frequency. That frequency — the rate of oscillation of the light’s electromagnetic waves — serves as a highly precise timekeeper.