Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

February 16, 2022 10:02 pm

Scientists Make Breakthrough In Warping Time At Smallest Scale Ever

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [S]cientists at JILA, a joint operation between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder, have measured time dilation at the smallest scale ever using the most accurate clocks in the world. The team showed that clocks located just a millimeter apart -- about the width of a pencil tip -- showed slightly different times due to the influence of Earth's gravity. The new experiment paves the way toward clocks with 50 times the precision of those available today, which could be used for a host of practical applications, while also shedding light on fundamental mysteries about our universe, including the long-sought "union of general relativity and quantum mechanics," according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature. In 2010, JILA scientists used these clocks to measure time dilation at two points with a difference in elevation of 33 centimeters (roughly a foot), which was a big advance at that point. After a decade of fine-tuning their clocks, [Jun Ye, a JILA physicist who co-authored the study] and his colleagues have managed to track frequency shifts within a sample of 100,000 extremely cold strontium atoms, enabling them to snag the unprecedented millimeter-scale effects of dilation. What's more, the team managed to keep these atoms dancing in perfect unison for 37 seconds, setting a new record for the duration of "quantum coherence," or the state in which the behavior of these atoms can be predicted.

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot