Ask someone on Earth for the time and they can give you an exact answer, thanks to our planet's intricate timekeeping system, built with atomic clocks, GPS satellites and high-speed telecommunications networks.
Researchers at the University of Sydney have cracked a long-standing problem in microchip-scale lasers by carving tiny "speed bumps" into the devices' optical cavity in their quest to produce exceptionally "clean" light. ...
Optical lattice clocks are devices that measure the passing of time via the frequency of light that is absorbed or emitted by laser-cooled atoms trapped in a repeating pattern of light interference known as optical lattice.
A study led by the University of Oxford has identified a surprising source of entropy in quantum timekeeping—the act of measurement itself. In a study published in Physical Review Letters, scientists demonstrate that the ...
Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein's ...
Researchers from the Department of Molecular Physics at the Fritz Haber Institute have demonstrated the first magneto-optical trap of a stable "closed-shell" molecule: aluminum monofluoride (AlF). They were able to cool AlF ...
Electricity powers our lives, including our cars, phones, computers, and more, through the movement of electrons within a circuit. While we can't see these electrons, electric currents moving through a conductor flow like ...
Having good neighbors can be very valuable—even in the atomic world. A team of Amsterdam physicists was able to determine an important property of strontium atoms, a highly useful element for modern applications in atomic ...
A team of physicists from the University of Innsbruck and Harvard University has proposed a fundamentally new way to generate laser light: a laser without mirrors. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, shows ...
Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich, together with international collaborators, have demonstrated for the first time that memristors—novel nanoscale switching devices—can provide stable resistance values directly linked ...
