Scientists at the National Center for Physics and Mathematics (NCPM), with the support of Rosatom, have made significant progress in developing super-accurate nuclear clocks capable of fundamentally changing time measurement standards. This was announced by the scientific director of the center, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev. According to him, the new technology will improve the accuracy of chronometry by two orders of magnitude compared to existing atomic standards.
Modern atomic clocks, which form the basis of global navigation systems, telecommunications, and scientific experiments, demonstrate a relative error of about 10⁻¹⁸. Nuclear clocks promise to achieve stability at the level of 10⁻²⁰ — that is, to be a hundred times more accurate. This breakthrough opens up new horizons for quantum computing, space navigation, testing fundamental laws of physics, and creating secure quantum communication channels.
The key advantage of nuclear clocks over traditional atomic clocks is their resistance to external electromagnetic disturbances: nuclear transitions are significantly less sensitive to environmental influences, which makes such clocks ideal for use in extreme conditions — from near-Earth orbit to interplanetary missions.