A rock is a clock: Physicists use matter to measure time

What is the simplest, most fundamental clock? Physicist Holger Müller and his UC Berkeley colleagues have shown that a single atom is sufficient to measure time using its high-frequency matter wave. Conversely, the frequency ...

Physicists split an atom using quantum mechanics precision

Researchers from the University of Bonn have just shown how a single atom can be split into its two halves, pulled apart and put back together again. While the word "atom" literally means "indivisible," the laws of quantum ...

Redefining time

Atomic clocks based on the oscillations of a cesium atom keep amazingly steady time and also define the precise length of a second. But cesium clocks are no longer the most accurate. That title has been transferred to an ...

Radiation detected 400 miles off Japanese coast

(AP) -- Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, ...

Hints of universal behavior seen in exotic three-atom states

A novel type of inter-particle binding predicted in 1970 and observed for the first time in 2006, is forming the basis for an intriguing kind of ultracold quantum chemistry. Chilled to nano-kelvin temperatures, cesium atoms ...

Most precise test yet of Einstein's gravitational redshift

(PhysOrg.com) -- While airplane and rocket experiments have proved that gravity makes clocks tick more slowly - a central prediction of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity - a new experiment in an atom interferometer ...

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