NIST’s ytterbium lattice atomic clocks, which were the world’s most stable clocks in 2013, were featured in two media lists of the year’s top discoveries. These experimental clocks use about 10,000 rare-earth atoms trapped in a laser light lattice to achieve high stability, with each tick’s duration precisely matching every other tick.
The South Pole Telescope, which relies on a camera made of NIST’s superconducting sensors and amplifiers, was cited in two magazines’ top 10 lists and another magazine’s year in review. The telescope’s discovery of a subtle twist in light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), known as B-mode polarization, was ranked as the number six discovery of the year by French science magazine La Recherche. This faint signal, caused by ancient light deflecting off matter, maps the distribution of all matter in the universe.
Keywords: clocks, sensors, polarization
