Physicists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a new atomic clock which uses entangled atoms.

According to an article on Science Daily, it is thought that this particular design keeps time more accurately than other atomic clocks and it could answer questions regarding to gravity’s effect on time.

“Entanglement-enhanced optical atomic clocks will have the potential to reach a better precision in one second than current state-of-the-art optical clocks,” said lead author Edwin Pedrozo-Peñafiel, who is a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

The team at MIT concluded that the entanglement of the atoms on this design results in the clock having four times the amount of precision compared to clocks without entanglement.

To help achieve this, the team cooled the atoms and secured them in a space comprised of two mirrors. A laser was then fired through the space which rebounded between the mirrors, reacting with the atoms in a grand manner.

“It’s like the light serves as a communication link between atoms,” said Chi Shu, a co-author of the study. 

“The first atom that sees this light will modify the light slightly, and that light also modifies the second atom, and the third atom, and through many cycles, the atoms collectively know each other and start behaving similarly.”