For decades, researchers around the world have been working toward this goal—and now major advances are following in rapid succession. Vienna is now home to the world’s first nuclear clock that stabilizes itself, as atomic clocks typically do. This system has been shown to remain stable for more than 24 hours without intervention, and the related findings are published in the journal Nature.

The technology has the potential to significantly surpass the precision of previous atomic clocks. It is an important step toward a new kind of high-performance metrology, allowing a range of physical quantities to be measured with previously unattainable precision.