We think of atomic clocks as the definitive timekeepers. They are famous for being accurate down to the picosecond. Unfortunately, they are still subject to general relativity, so if you put them on a different planet, they ...
A University of Birmingham scientist has built a "mini-universe" that takes a step toward answering one of science's biggest questions: "What is time?" Publishing his findings in Physical Review Research, Professor Giovanni ...
Two independent research teams have achieved a longstanding goal in physics: building a working nuclear clock. The devices, developed by Beichen Huang and colleagues at Tsinghua University and by Luca Toscani De Col and colleagues ...
In a quest to build the most accurate quantum sensors in the world, scientists are constantly improving their performance, making them more precise, more stable and more reliable. But eventually, physical constraints will ...
Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in spacetime. Their first direct detection in 2015 marked a revolutionary moment in astronomy. Today, we have a thorough understanding of signals that travel far from their sources through ...
Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining to eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel ...
In a grandfather clock, a pendulum swings back and forth and this periodic motion is maintained using the energy stored in its suspended weights. This is done with the help of the escapement mechanism, which converts the ...
Creating perfect randomness is surprisingly difficult. Even modern random number generators never generate completely ideal random numbers: small systematic errors can result in some numbers appearing slightly more frequently ...
Quantum computers get a lot of attention, even though they are not ready for prime time, but quantum sensors are already doing useful work. These sensors measure fields, forces and motion so small that ordinary background ...
They rank among the darkest and coldest places in the solar system: Hundreds of lunar craters, many of them at the moon's south pole, never receive direct sunlight and lie in permanent shadow. That's exactly why physicist ...
