PARIS: Japanese scientists say they have made a technical breakthrough in the quest to perfect the world’s most accurate clock, a timepiece that would lose only one-quintillionth (a million-million-millionth) of a second per day.
University of Tokyo researcher Hidetoshi Katori and colleagues devised a ‘pendulum’ of strontium atoms that ride on the crest of highly stable laser-generated lightwaves, according to their study, which appeared on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal. So-called optical clocks have a potential for accuracy of one in 10 to the power of 18, or 10 followed by 17 zeroes (one-quintillionth).—AFP
