Everything is a step towards defining a second.
A team of researchers in China created a new record when they synced their optical clocks over a distance of 70 miles . This is a major improvement from their last attempt, which was carried out across a distance of just under 10 miles ,The team was led by Jian-Wei Pan, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, and this moment marks an important milestone as meteorologists look to shift to optical clocks to redefine a second before the end of this decade.
Optical clocks on the other hand use the 'ticking' of atoms of strontium and ytterbium that can provide even smaller fractions of time. However, official time is not the product of one clock but needs to be averaged from hundreds of timepieces that are located across the world. To do so, these clocks need to be synced from time to time, and it is here that meteorologists have faced difficulties in distances.
While cesium clocks can be synced using microwave radiation, optical clocks have a much higher frequency, which these low-frequency waves cannot match. Therefore, researchers have turned to waves in the visible light spectrum to get the job done. In previous attempts, researchers have used for transmitting the signals, but the scale of the network that would be needed to define a second is impractical for deployment, the