Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co have developed an atomic clock claimed to be accurate to within a second every 1.6m years compared with the previous best, which is accurate to one second in 300,000 years: the clock is built around Caesium atoms that resonate at about 9GHz, and the resonance is used to synchronise a microwave signal inside a Caesium beam tube, creating a clock said to look like a desktop computer with digital display on one side; it costs $66,000, and has applications in astronomy and astrophysics, and more mundanely in synchronising computers carrying out high speed long distance data transmissions.
