First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick 49
Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second.
But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
I want a nuclear wrist watch (Score:2)
Vault-Tec Future (Score:3)
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Confucius say, "Man who wear nuclear wrist watch, strap on tiny tiny clock."
Actually, the quote is, "A man with one nuclear watch knows the time; a man with two, also knows the time." :-)
(Poking fun at Segal's law [wikipedia.org]...)
Re:I want a nuclear wrist watch (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I want a nuclear wrist watch (Score:1)
Radium!
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yes they were so cool, i always wanted one. all the cool (now dead?) kids had them.
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I seem to remember a scene in Dr. No where James Bond is using a geiger counter which keeps reading high until he takes off his watch.
Back in the day they used all kinds to make 'glow in the dark', nowadays it's a lot safer ;-)
Re: I want a nuclear wrist watch (Score:2)
Since I'm an internet expert on everything, i'd refer to your watch as radioluminescent, or scintillating if you're fancy.
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That's it.
Ironically, Iran was making those, in some sort of mountain factory, but ... :-)
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Bah. I want a nuclear hand grenade. It'd be a hell of a way to shutup that stupid neighbor who keeps complaining to my landlord about my drinking.
Re: I want a nuclear wrist watch (Score:2)
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steam clocks are fine, you can have a nuclear power source generate the steam and its all good.
They exist. (Score:2)
Chip-scale atomic clocks are a thing [microchip.com]. The problem is that they aren't exactly low enough power to be wrist mounted as they need 115 mW constantly. You absolute can make it into a wristwatch (and people have) but it will need regular charging... unless you are using betavoltaic nuclear batteries. [wikipedia.org] However to reach the power output needed with what is on the market, you would need about 120K of them.
The natural reaction to this is "what's the purpose of building up that kind of arm strength if the batteries ar
83%, you say? (Score:3)
It's pretty impressive that we know so much about the stuff and can make those sorts of declarations.
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yes, decades of research, development of more and better methods and instruments, cross-referencing discoveries from elementary particles to the largest structures in the visible universe do produce far reaching insights.
sadly, the work that goes into them is often underappreciated because it isn't easy to understand.
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Imagine those crazy quantum science physicists before, say, 1960, all wanting public money and not having squat to show for what wonders of technology it would enable. We should claw that money back, eh?
Science is a web of interconnected results, dolt. Start axing parts like the current administration and you can expect the U.S. to decline in ways you won't like. But then if you are a Maggot, maybe you will.
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"Dark arts, you say?
Let me dig out the spell book!
Ah, yes... this one should work well for your purposes! (insert evil cackle)
All you need is 11 1/2 virgins, five three-eyed goats, half a still alive pig, a leprechaun, two bags of popcorn (lots of butter and salt), two zombies, a gallon of LSD, and about 50 miles of suture thread, and a sewing needle... and, something will happen... someone spilled coffee all over this, can't make it out. The rest is a smear, so I don't know what'll happen. Use your imagi
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It's pretty impressive that we know so much about the stuff and can make those sorts of declarations.
Its pretty impressive that we can manage to get millions in taxpayer funding over decades of study, call the field “dark” to make it sound really cool, but in reality still don’t have a single fucking clue as to what all that cool-sounding “dark” shit is.
Which we also estimate there is a LOT of, making this whole idea that a clock might run into 80% of the universe seem silly. It should be smashing into dark matter almost constantly unless we also discover it magically evades
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Science is hard, get over it. The Universe doesn't send its secrets dancing naked in front us shouting "see me!!". Actually, we do not know what quantum particles of anything actually are. We make observations and use those to winnow out mathematical theories of them, but in essence we do not know them as a "ding an sich".
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Science is hard, get over it. The Universe doesn't send its secrets dancing naked in front us shouting "see me!!". Actually, we do not know what quantum particles of anything actually are. We make observations and use those to winnow out mathematical theories of them, but in essence we do not know them as a "ding an sich".
Science is hard. Believing science isn’t ripping taxpayers off to fund water-is-wet studies and fluff “expert” arrogance, is even harder.
Do you require a theoretical proof to understand why, or is Greed N. Corruption, CEO of US Capitalism dancing naked in front of taxpayers enough?
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Its pretty impressive that we can manage to get millions in taxpayer funding over decades of study
It is pretty impressive you're concerned about pocket money.
The NSF total budget since the year 2000 is about $200B.
The tax breaks to the people with net worth above $1B for the same period is about $3T.
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Its pretty impressive that we can manage to get millions in taxpayer funding over decades of study
It is pretty impressive you're concerned about pocket money.
The NSF total budget since the year 2000 is about $200B.
The tax breaks to the people with net worth above $1B for the same period is about $3T.
Do you want me to ask how many tax breaks come in the form of billionaire donations to science foundations, or would that be too inconvenient?
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Do you want me to ask how many tax breaks come in the form of billionaire donations to science foundations, or would that be too inconvenient?
Sure, you can ask, and I'll tell you right away. It is here:
https://indicators.sciphil.org... [sciphil.org]
$27 billion a year last year, a lot less than a quarter of the tax breaks, and that's mostly spent on vanity projects of the "make me live forever" kind, and most of that isn't donated on the research actual merits, but on the whims and misconceptions of the donor. Therefore the impact to actual science isn't even remotely comparable.
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Its pretty impressive that we can manage to get millions in taxpayer funding over decades of study,
You really want to go down that road? Let's begin with the Gulf War 3.0.
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Its pretty impressive that we can manage to get millions in taxpayer funding over decades of study,
You really want to go down that road? Let's begin with the Gulf War 3.0.
Sure. I’ll just deduct the $100 billion sent to Ukraine in support of a dishonorably discharged cokehead serving on Ukrainian executive energy boards backwashing those funds through a Bahamian crypto orgy fund donating laundered money to the DNC, along with the trillions handed out to illegal immigrant voters paid to vote Democrat by an Open Border Czar who left America Open and vulnerable for four years, first.
Compared to USAID gangster rap funding and sanctuary cities creating 9/11 2.0? Do you rea
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“What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Dear lord you need some help. What's your address so I can gift you this? https://www.amazon.com/Combati... [amazon.com]
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Its pretty impressive that we can manage to get millions in taxpayer funding over decades of study
It's not impressive, it's essential. Taxpayer funding for things people have considered irrelevant have incidentally lead to a whole world of real world benefits for average people.
Take for example the International Space Station. Many people think this is a waste of money. Those same people now benefit from:
- HEPA filtration in vacuum cleaners and cars (originally developed for long term space survival)
- Better medical diagnostics (space based sensors for science no one though relevant led to modulated x-r
Re: 83%, you say? (Score:2)
The return on investment from tech created for space vs that based on direct funding of science and tech is pathetic. Theres almost nothing the space program gave rise to that wouldnt have happened anyway. And HEPA filters? Really? That barrel you're scraping probably has a hole in the bottom by now.
Paywalled (Score:2)
Another useful article that links to a paywall FFS
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Is there a master clock somewhere? (Score:2)
What's accuracy being measured against? And to what scale picoseconds?
Achilles, where's that tortoise?
My submission was better (Score:2)
Summary misses the coolest details (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally you need a serious punch to get a nucleus into an excited state: x-rays, gamma rays, or bombardment with energic particles. It so happens that thorium-229 requires the lowest energy to get to an excited state, and that can be achieved with deep-UV (148 nm) light. Laser light at that wavelength has only recently become possible. Also: Th-229 does not really exist in nature, you have to extract it from the decay of U-235, which itself has low natural abundance.
So it's pretty cool stuff, and this first demonstration hints at what could be possible in the future. Atomic clocks use light in the microwave range; this nuclear clock uses light in a frequency band five orders or magnitude higher, and so could theoretically have that much greater precision. And because the fundamental phenomenon occurs in the nucleus rather than the electron cloud, it's much less susceptible to external interference.
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I was interesting by the article's comment that it could lead to smaller clocks, but that doesn't seem likely from what you are saying. At the moment a "chip scale" atomic clock is a metal can maybe the size of a consumer CPU, and pulling quite a bit of power.
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"Laser light at that wavelength has only recently become possible."
Lolwut? We've been able to run multiple frequency-doubling passes on various laser sources to reach most any range of UV laser for well over a decade. The problem is you get not a whole lot of radiant output - less than half a watt output at gobs of watts input.
Also, 148nm is not deep UV, that is flat-out Vacuum UV.
TAI (Score:2)
Isn't the length of a day variable? (Score:2)
Isn't the length of a day variable?
Like I understand the want and desire to more accurately time a day, and the scientific reasons to. But we're trying to precisely map the time of a spin of a globe as it spins in orbit around a sun - and to my understanding that day length varies based on anything from the amount of groundwater we pump out of the ground to the varying cyclical distance of our moon to our surface. And from what I understand we have to co
Re: Isn't the length of a day variable? (Score:2)
Defining time by the earths rotation? That ship sailed back in the 60s.
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Correct. So it will be out of sync and so will Bezo's 10,000 year clock in the mountain.
speeding up
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
slowing down
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Dark matter (Score:2)
If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock.
Or it could not, since we have no idea what this dark matter could be made of, if it even exists.