Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 5

requires very good clocks that measure short times

electromagnetic waves move very quickly


use atomic clocks
came into being during World War II; nothing to do with GPS
-physicists wanted to test Einsteins ideas about gravity and time
previous clocks relied on pendulums
early atomic clocks looked at vibrations of quartz crystal
keep time to < 1/1000th second per day
..not accurate enough to assess affect of gravity on time
Einstein predicted that clock on Mt. Everest
would run 30 millionths of a second faster
than clock at sea level
needed to look at oscillations of atoms
principle behind atomic clocks
atoms absorb or emit electomagnetic energy in discrete amounts
that correspond to differences in energy between different
configurations of the atoms
when atom goes from one energy state to lower one,
it emits an electromagnetic wave of characteristic frequency
known as resonant frequency
these resonant frequencies are identical for every atom
of a given type:
cesium 133 atoms: 9,192,631,770 cycles/second
cesium can be used to create extraordinarily precise clock
(advances also led to using hydrogen and rubidium)
GPS clocks are cesium clocks
What is Caesium 133 atoms?
Caesium or cesium[note 1] is a chemical element with symbol Cs and atomic
number 55. It is a soft, silvery-gold alkali metal with a melting point of 28 C (82
F), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near
room temperature.
Caesium-based atomic clocks observe electromagnetic transitions in the
hyperfine structure of caesium-133 atoms and use it as a reference point. The
first accurate caesium clock was built by Louis Essen in 1955 at the National
Physical Laboratory in the UK.[72] They have been improved repeatedly over the
past half-century, and form the basis for standards-compliant time and frequency
measurements. These clocks measure frequency with an error of 2 to 3 parts in
1014, which would correspond to a time measurement accuracy of 2
nanoseconds per day, or one second in 1.4 million years. The latest versions are
accurate to better than 1 part in 1015, which means they would be off by about 2
seconds since the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago,[8] and has
been regarded as "the most accurate realization of a unit that mankind has yet
achieved."[69]
What is a Cesium Atomic Clock?

Definition of 1 second
Duration of 9,192,631,770 periods
of the radiation corresponding to
the transition between the two
hyperfine levels of the ground state
of the caesium-133 atom.

Вам также может понравиться