{"id":243366,"date":"2026-08-29T09:19:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T14:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/diamond-clock-combines-two-signals-to-cut-temperature-driven-drift"},"modified":"2026-08-29T09:19:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T14:19:46","slug":"diamond-clock-combines-two-signals-to-cut-temperature-driven-drift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/diamond-clock-combines-two-signals-to-cut-temperature-driven-drift","title":{"rendered":"Diamond clock combines two signals to cut temperature-driven drift"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/diamond-clock-combines-two-signals-to-cut-temperature-driven-drift2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Despite all the advertisements for engagement rings and necklace gifts, natural diamonds are imperfect. Their carbon atoms are arranged in a cubic lattice, but they nonetheless contain several types of crystallographic defects due to impurities that occasionally replace a carbon atom. The most common types of impurities are nitrogen and boron; \u201cType I\u201d diamonds contain nitrogen impurities, which can be isolated or clustered, at concentrations of up to 1%, and make up about 95% of all natural diamonds.<\/p>\n<p>More specifically, some diamonds have a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) impurity. A nitrogen atom replaces one carbon atom, and adjacent to it is an empty lattice spot. One type of solid-state clock, a diamond clock, uses this feature to measure time, as the defect has optical and nuclear spin states that can be manipulated with microwaves and other light. But the NV energy levels are strongly modified by temperature.<\/p>\n<p>Now a group of researchers from the U.S. and Germany has developed a way to overcome this limitation. Their <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/z2sl-6gcc\" target=\"_blank\">work is published<\/a> in the journal Physical Review Applied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite all the advertisements for engagement rings and necklace gifts, natural diamonds are imperfect. Their carbon atoms are arranged in a cubic lattice, but they nonetheless contain several types of crystallographic defects due to impurities that occasionally replace a carbon atom. The most common types of impurities are nitrogen and boron; \u201cType I\u201d diamonds contain [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}