Scientists develop a clock so accurate it could detect dark matter

The most accurate atomic clock ever produced will make your mind go tick, tick, boom.

You might not be able to fit it on your wrist, but physicists have created two clocks that are so accurate they won’t lose time in the next 15 billion years.

The research, published Wednesday in Nature, describes an atomic clock that uses an optical lattice composed of laser beams trapping ytterbium atoms. Every atom has a consistent vibrational frequency, which allows physicists the opportunity to measure how the ytterbium atoms transition between two energy levels — essentially creating the clock’s “tick”.

Notably, the physicists based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland compared two independent atomic clocks to record historical new performance benchmarks across three key measures: systematic uncertainty, stability and reproducibility.

Andrew Ludlow, project leader, explained to NIST that these three measures can be considered the “royal flush of performance” for atomic clocks. The ability to reproduce the accuracy of the ytterbium lattice clock in two independent experiments is of particular importance because it shows for the first time, according to Ludlow, that the performance of the clock is “limited by Earth’s gravitational effects.”

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