why Quartz clock are said to be most accurate time measuring clock
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IF TIME waits for no man, then neither does human ingenuity in measuring its passing.
Throughout history, more stable and accurate clocks have led to advances in communications and navigation. Now a clock 1000 times more accurate than any of its predecessors has set another benchmark, and could even be used to create a more precise definition of how long a second is.
The new clock is a variant on the atomic clocks that appeared in the 1950s. Atomic clocks usually work by measuring the frequency at which atoms resonate. For instance, the outer electrons of a caesium-133 atom resonate between two energy states exactly 9,192,631,770 times each second, emitting microwaves of exactly that frequency as they do so. This property has been used since 1967 to define what we mean by 1 second – it is officially the time it takes for a caesium atom to resonate 9,192,631,770 times.
The first atomic clocks could pin this down to an accuracy of 1 part in 1010. Today’s caesium clocks can measure time to an accuracy of 1 in 1015, or 1 second in about 30 million years. But the search is on for ever more precise timepieces.
One way to create a more accurate clock is to increase the rate at which it “ticks”, says Thomas Udem of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. “A clock has a counter that counts something that is periodic. The shorter that period is, the more accurate the clock. That is why people went from sundials, with one period per day, to pendulum clocks, with one period per second, to quartz clocks with 10,000 oscillations per second. Now we have the caesium clock counting with 9 billion oscillations per second.”
Throughout history, more stable and accurate clocks have led to advances in communications and navigation. Now a clock 1000 times more accurate than any of its predecessors has set another benchmark, and could even be used to create a more precise definition of how long a second is.
The new clock is a variant on the atomic clocks that appeared in the 1950s. Atomic clocks usually work by measuring the frequency at which atoms resonate. For instance, the outer electrons of a caesium-133 atom resonate between two energy states exactly 9,192,631,770 times each second, emitting microwaves of exactly that frequency as they do so. This property has been used since 1967 to define what we mean by 1 second – it is officially the time it takes for a caesium atom to resonate 9,192,631,770 times.
The first atomic clocks could pin this down to an accuracy of 1 part in 1010. Today’s caesium clocks can measure time to an accuracy of 1 in 1015, or 1 second in about 30 million years. But the search is on for ever more precise timepieces.
One way to create a more accurate clock is to increase the rate at which it “ticks”, says Thomas Udem of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. “A clock has a counter that counts something that is periodic. The shorter that period is, the more accurate the clock. That is why people went from sundials, with one period per day, to pendulum clocks, with one period per second, to quartz clocks with 10,000 oscillations per second. Now we have the caesium clock counting with 9 billion oscillations per second.”
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