(Feb.9, '15) We all like to know our watches keep the time well, but
Hidetoshi Katori, of RIKEN's Quantum Metrology Laboratory and the University of
Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering, is taking precision to an entirely new
dimension. In work published in Nature Photonics, Katori's group demonstrated
two cryogenically cooled optical lattice clocks that can be synchronized to a
tremendous one part in 2.0 x 10-18—meaning that they would only go out of synch
by a second in 16 billion years. This is nearly 1,000 times more precise than
the current international timekeeping standard cesium atomic clock.