The Accurate Time

Perhaps not surprisingly, the laboratory's nuclear timepiece is considered to be the most accurate in the whole wide range, and today it is revealed by a piece of Nature tissue. She is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which operates the JILA Labs in cooperation with CU Boulder.

"In the next five to ten years, you can look forward to more major breaks in our watches." The proof for NAIST is that its technologies are definitely the best, a constant struggle. In spite of the fact that it should hold the ideal time for 5 billion years, a formality keeps the watch from being rigorously regarded as the most accurate out there: it is built on the false item.

The NIST watch uses strontium atom, but the acceptable meaning of time is caesium atom. NIST's hopes are that it will ultimately be able to convince the standardisation committee to agree to strontium either in lieu of, or in lieu of, caesium, which will give it a good basis to move its work forward.

However, on the way there it will have to compete with groundbreaking caesium-based watches. Although it is over an order of magnitude less accurate, it has been found that one of the Paris Observatory's most recent caesium watches is able to remain accurate for 300 million years within a second - a huge jump over other caesium-watches.

But like NIST watches, it also tries to see a shift in the way a second is measured: although counting on caesium, it does measure time in a non-standardized and still non-accepted way. NIST has developed a new nuclear timepiece that follows the same principle. Just like the Paris Observatory's astronomical timepiece, NIST uses a high-performance lasers to cause a grid of electrons to vibrate quickly between different energies while simultaneously measuring its number.

Although it is a technique that NIST has been using for several years, it is said that recent advances in lasers stabilisation and accuracy have allowed the new astronomical timepiece to function far better than previous years. Of course, the aim of developing such accurate timepieces is by no means to improve our timepieces.

Scientists suggest that these new nuclear timepieces could be used to create unbelievably accurate mass accelerometers for gravitational force and temp, giving scientists in general an opportunity to take more detailed measurements of tiny amounts than ever before.