The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Strong interaction makes better clocks !
I have not read this report in Science [331:1043 (2011)], but it catches my attention simply because of its claim ! Anyway, it should be funny to read. "Optical lattice clocks with extremely stable frequency are possible when many atoms are interrogated simultaneously, but this precision may come at the cost of systematic inaccuracy resulting from atomic interactions. Density-dependent frequency shifts can occur even in a clock that uses fermionic atoms if they are subject to inhomogeneous optical excitation. However, sufficiently strong interactions can suppress collisional shifts in lattice sites containing more than one atom. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach with a strontium lattice clock by reducing both the collisional frequency shift and its uncertainty to the level of 10−17. This result eliminates the compromise between precision and accuracy in a many-particle system; both will continue to improve as the number of particles increases. "
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