The ytterbium clock ticks are stable to within less than two parts in 1 quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros), roughly 10 times better than the previous best published results for other atomic clocks.

The ytterbium clock ticks are stable to within less than two parts in 1 quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros), roughly 10 times better than the previous best published results for other atomic clocks.

In comparison, if the new ytterbium atomic clock were to have started functioning since the Big Bang -- about 13.8 billion years ago -- by now, it would be only off by one second, the Los Angeles ...

Scientists have set a new world record for atomic clock stability using a pair of ytterbium-based timepieces stable down to quintillionths of a second. The researchers believe that their new ...

The ytterbium clock ticks are stable to within less than two parts in 1 quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros), roughly 10 times better than the previous best published results for other atomic clocks.

NIST's new optical atomic clock uses two magnetic coils (red rings) and an optical lattice (red laser beam), as well as intersecting violet lasers to cool ytterbium atoms, slowing their motion.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with funding from DARPA’s Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) program, have built a pair of ytterbium atomic ...

The optical lattice clock Ludlow and his colleagues developed measures the much faster oscillations of a ytterbium atom. Its atomic pendulum swings about 10,000 times faster, at a speed of 500 ...

Ytterbium is highly stable, so ytterbium atomic clocks are accurate past the nanosecond scale, all the way to the picosecond and femtosecond scale (1/1,000,000,000,000,000th of a second). But the ...

In the final analysis, by showing that 10 heterogenous clocks across three continents could agree with each other to within a ...

For starters, the team used atoms of ytterbium instead of the more common cesium which is often used in atomic clocks. Ytterbium vibrates 100,000 times more often per second than cesium, allowing ...

The PTB team compared their new clock to two other optical clocks—one based on strontium atoms and the other on ytterbium ions. These comparisons had relative uncertainties of 4.2 × 10⁻¹⁷ ...