NIST/JILA physicist Jun Ye
Credit: R. Jacobson/NIST
Physicist Jun Ye has a knack for making every second count—literally. At JILA, a joint research institute of the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Ye and his colleagues recently built the world’s most precise clock—a device that would neither gain nor lose a second in 90 billion years, more than six times greater than the age of the universe.
For Ye, though, what matters just as much as the precision is the means of attaining it. Mirrors, miniature lenses, opto-electronic devices, and extraordinarily stable lasers: All of these must work in synchrony to build an atomic clock based on the oscillations of electrons orbiting the nucleus of individual strontium atoms.
Ye’s fascination with measuring tools dates back to his childhood. Born in Shanghai in 1967, Ye came of age at a propitious time in China: He was young enough to have escaped the Cultural Revolution’s destructive impact on schooling, yet old enough to reap the benefits of China’s revival of its national educational system.
Both of Ye’s parents had demanding careers—his father was a naval officer and his mother an environmental scientist and city official--and he often stayed with his paternal grandmother in Shaoxing, about 200 kilometers south of Shanghai. She had grown up during the hardship years of World War II and had never learned to read or write. Yet his grandmother gave Ye his first tools: a bundle of pencils and a stack of paper. Write down or draw anything you like, she told him.
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