Singapore Scientists Claim They Built The World’s Most Accurate Atomic Clock

Insider Brief

• Researchers at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies reported a lutetium-ion atomic clock that would be off by no more than about one second over 300 billion years, the best reported accuracy for an optical atomic clock.
• The team compared two single-ion lutetium clocks over 200 hours and found their ticks matched closely enough to differ by about one second over 55 billion years, the most precise clock comparison reported to date.
• The clocks’ low sensitivity to temperature and magnetic fields could support studies of gravity and fundamental physics, while contributing data toward a possible redefinition of the second after 2030.
• Pictured in the Centre for Quantum Technologies’ lutetium atomic clock lab are (from left) Associate Professor Murray Barrett, PhD student Michael Lee and Senior Research Scientist Kyle Arnold (Centre for Quantum Technologies)

PRESS RELEASE — Take a second and turn it into trillions of moments. Measure each one. That’s how precisely an atomic clock at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) keeps time – and with record-making accuracy, according to results published in Nature on 23 September.

“I am confident that what we have now is the most accurate clock in the world,” says team leader Murray Barrett, a CQT Principal Investigator and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore.