China's optical clock technology has achieved an important breakthrough, with an error of less than 1 second in 30 billion years

According to the "Quantum Science Talk" public account, recently, Hefei National Laboratory/University of Science and Technology of China Pan Jianwei, Dai Hanning, Chen Yuao, Peng Chengzhi and others have made milestone progress in the development of optical clocks.The research team successfully achieved comprehensive breakthroughs in the stability and uncertainty indicators of strontium atomic optical lattice clocks10⁻¹⁹Magnitude, equivalent to about 30 billion years, with an error of less than 1 second,Become one of the high-precision optical clocks that meets the requirements for the redefinition of the second in the International System of Units.

This achievement marks that my country's research level in the field of time precision measurement has reached the forefront of the world. The relevant results have been published in the international metrology journal "Metrology".

It is understood that as the most precise time and frequency standard today, the core of the optical clock is to use the frequency signal generated by the internal energy level transition of the atom to define time.

It can provide extremely high timing accuracy, which will directly support the redefinition of "second" in the International System of Units, bringing the global time standard into the optical era, with accuracy four orders of magnitude higher than the existing microwave time standard.

At the same time, it can also provide a reliable time benchmark for modern technologies such as satellite navigation, communications and precision measurements, and provide a new platform for basic research fields in physics such as testing general relativity and detecting gravitational waves and dark matter.

According to reports,In the past, the overall stability and uncertainty performance of global optical clocks mainly stayed at the level of 10⁻¹⁸.Only a few top institutions (such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, etc.) are close to or touching this level.

The research team has carried out long-term systematic research on the key bottlenecks that restrict the performance of optical clocks, and has recently achieved a number of breakthroughs.

Relevant results provide a feasible technical path for the development of transportable optical clocks and satellite-borne optical clocks.It has laid a solid and reliable foundation for the in-depth application of optical clock technology in testing basic physical laws, supporting next-generation satellite navigation systems, and building a global unified ultra-high-precision time benchmark.