Levitated timepiece sets new benchmark

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Collaborating teams of scientists from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno manufactured a new type of mechanical “clock” composed of a birefringent sphere of the size of a blood cell oscillating in a light trap. The sphere moves in a vacuum to minimize its interaction with the environment and damping. The team managed to achieve perfect harmony between the movement of the sphere and tilting of its axis, similar to a child on a swing, which led to an increase in the accuracy of the frequency of the sphere's oscillations by two orders of magnitude compared to previous levitating objects. The quality Q of this oscillator has reached 100 million, which corresponds to a loss of about a millionth of a second in two days. Ultra-precise frequency sources are used for very precise synchronization of events, such as GPS positioning systems. Here, scientists have obtained a very sensitive tool for monitoring changes in the environment, e.g. pressure, or extremely weak forces acting on an oscillating ball, e.g. gravity.

https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/levitated-timepiece-sets-new-benchmark/


Online: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaaz9858/tab-article-info

Levitující hodinky udržují přesné tempo

A calcium carbonate micro-sphere, the size of a cell, and levitated by light, acted as an ultra-stable oscillator (“clock”). Credit: Yoshi Arita (University of St Andrews and Chiba University).