For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible,...For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, ...so that THEY ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE: Col 1:16 / Rom.1:20

Monday, March 11, 2024

Creator's Mystery Clock

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, .... Galatians 4:4


"Physicists connected together a cloud of ytterbium-171 atoms with
streams of photons reflected from a surrounding hall of mirrors and measured the timing of their tiny wiggles.

Their results show that entangling atoms in this way could speed up the time-measuring process of atomic nuclei clocks, making them more precise than ever. In principle, a clock based on this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time itself.

Similar to other cutting-edge clocks based on the nuclei of atoms of
caesium and thorium, time in this kind of setup is divided by oscillations in a
ytterbium nucleus after it absorbs a specific energy of light.
Since ytterbium's core can be made to hum at a rate 100,000 times
faster than the nucleus of a caesium atom, it makes for a far more precise time-keeping mechanism.

But there comes a point when quantum physics says it's impossible to say exactly where an atom's oscillations start and stop. This Standard Quantum Limit (SQL) acts like a blur on the atomic pendulum; you might have a faster ticking clock, but what good does it do if you can't even measure it?

One trick is to record the frequencies of multiple atoms humming all at once within a lattice consisting of hundreds of tiny atomic pendulums. Current atomic clock technologies use lasers engineered to be as stable as possible, providing each atom with an extremely similar frequency of light. By combining their collective blur, individual uncertainties average out.
This new method goes a step further in this averaging process. By connecting atoms together in a way that entangles the quantum probabilities of their spins, it's possible to redistribute the uncertainty in the system, increasing the precision in some parts at the expense of others.


"It's like the light serves as a communication link between atoms," 
says MIT physicist Chi Shu.
"The first atom that sees this light will modify the light slightly, and
that light also modifies the second atom, and the third atom, and through many cycles, the atoms collectively know each other and start behaving similarly.
"


In this case, the team found entanglement made the measurement process roughly three times faster compared with clocks acting at the SQL.
That might not seem all that dramatic, but a speed boost could be just
the thing we need to study some of the more subtle influences the Universe has on time.
"As the Universe ages, does the speed of light change? Does the charge of the electron change?" says lead researcher Vladan Vuletic from MIT.
"That's what you can probe with more precise atomic clocks."
It could even allow us to find the point at which general relativity falls apart, pointing to new physics that connects the defined curvature of space-time with the uncertain nature of quantum fields." ScienceAlert