DOE Science Highlights Professor Saw Wai Hla’s Atomic-Scale Breakthrough - Ohio University

Scientists have reached a major milestone in the quest to build an entirely new kind of clock. After decades of research, a team in Vienna has developed the world's first self-stabilizing nuclear clock, a device that could eventually measure time with far greater precision than today's most advanced atomic clocks. Unlike earlier prototypes, the new nuclear clock can maintain its own stability without depending on a conventional atomic clock. Researchers have demonstrated that it can operate steadily for more than 24 hours without intervention.

Physicists have used radioactive lutetium to create what they say is the most accurate atomic clock ever, keeping time perfectly up to 19 decimal places.

The tracks left by subatomic particles as they travel through a bubble chamber. (Kevin Fleming/The Image Bank Unreleased/Getty Images) There's something hinky about the amount of gravity in the Universe. When all the normal matter and the gravity that should come with it have been totted up, a discrepancy emerges in the final numbers. Not just a smidge, a little skimming off the top, a one here or a zero there: there's way more gravity than there is normal matter to make it. We call the unknown source of the gravity excess dark matter, and scientists estimate there's roughly five times as much of it as there is normal matter in the Universe. That means the mystery matter should be absolutely everywhere, and so it is, as far as physicists can tell. But we still don't know what it is, let alone how to make it. Now, a theoretical paper has identified a new recipe we could try. What if, ask theoretical physicists Stefan Evans and Ralf Schützhold of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany, we just took a bunch of atomic nuclei and gave them a good, hard shake? OK, not literally – and obviously there's a good bit more to it than a nucleus maraca.