The beat is as reliable as an atom's pulse in the universe.
When pushed to their limits, the most advanced 'atomic' clocks lose count.
Most experiments have only been able to demonstrate the ability of atoms to tie particles down enough to squeeze a little more out of them.
A team of researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK have shown that the mathematics holds true over larger spaces.
This would allow for a level of comparison in the split-second timing of multiple clocks to a degree that could reveal previously undetected signals in a range of physical phenomena.
Light probes the movement of atoms to keep time.
Like a child on a swing, components of atoms whiz back and forth. A photon from a laser is all it takes to set the swinging in motion.
Various techniques and materials have been tested over the years to advance the technology to the point that differences in their frequencies barely add up to a second's worth of error over the 13 million years of the Universe.
There is a point when the rules of time-keeping become a little vague because of the uncertainty of the quantum landscape.
The cost of small uncertainties between the photon's kick and the atom's response is what makes higher frequencies of light possible.
The solution to these can be found by reading the atom several times.
A single shot reading is ideal. The uncertainty of this approach can be improved if the atom has already been measured.
It's an intuitive and strange concept. It's not possible to say that objects have a value or state until they're seen.
All parts of the system will be fated to deliver a predictable outcome if they are already part of a larger system.
It's like flipping two coins from the same wallet and knowing if one comes up heads the other will come up tails.
The two coins in this case were a pair of strontium ion and a photon.
It wasn't intended to produce revolutionary levels of precision in atomic clocks.
The team was able to reduce the uncertainty of the measurement with the help of the charged atoms of strontium.
It is theoretically possible to entangle optical atomic clocks around the world to improve their accuracy.
While our result is very much a proof-of-principle, and the absolute precision we achieve is a few orders of magnitude below the state of the art, we hope that the techniques shown here might someday improve state-of- the art systems.
At some point, a path to the ultimate precision allowed by quantum theory will need to be found.
Squeezing a little more confidence out of an atomic clock could be just what we need to measure tiny differences in time produced by mass over the smallest distances, a tool that could lead to quantum theories of gravity.
Outside of research, using entanglement to reduce uncertainty in quantum measurements could have applications in everything from quantum computing to encryption and communications.
The research was published in a journal.
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