Physicist Holger Müller and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley (United States), have founda new way to measure time using cesium atoms. As explained in an article published in the magazineScienceWith this method it is possible to tell what time it is using only the matter wave of a cesium atom and refer to your method as a Compton clock, because it is based on the Compton call frequency of a matter wave. Thus they take advantage of the fact that, in nature, matter can be both a particle and a wave, their method of telling the time uses the oscillations of a matter wave, whose frequency is 10,000 million times higher than that of the visible light.
At the moment the new watch es still 100 million times less accurate than today’s best atomic clocks, which use aluminum ions. However, future improvements in the technique could increase its precision to that of atomic clocks, including cesium clocks that are now used to define the second as a unit of time, says the researcher himself.
“When you make a wall clock, there is a pendulum and a clock that counts the oscillations of the pendulum. So there is something that swings ?, explains Müller.” There was no way to make a clock out of matter waves, since its frequency oscillation is 10 billion times higher than even visible light oscillations. “
However, last year the scientist realized that he might be able to combine two well-known techniques to create a clockwork mechanism and explicitly show that lThe Compton frequency of a single particle is useful as a reference for a clock. Acesium atom that moves away and then returnsis less than one that stops, so the wave motion of cesium matter oscillates less times and the frequency difference (of about 100,000 oscillations minus 10 million trillion trillion oscillations per second, that is, 3 x 1,025 for a cesium atom) could be measurable.
In the laboratory, Müller proved that he could measure this difference byallow matter waves from fixed and moving cesium atoms to intervene in an atomic interferometer. “Our watch is accurate to seven parts per billion,” he clarifies. ? It’s like measuring an eight-year second, almost as good as the first cesium atomic clock some 60 years ago. Perhaps we can develop it further and one day define the second as so many oscillations of the Compton frequency for a given particle, “he announces.
Müller hopes to advance his technique for even smaller particles, such as electrons or positrons even, in the latter case, with thecreation of an antimatter clock. This physicist hopes that one day he will be able to tell time using quantum fluctuations in a vacuum.
