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Physics

Physicists find ultimate limit for how accurate clocks can be

A fundamental trade-off between the resolution of a clock and its accuracy could have important implications for quantum computers, which must measure short timescales accurately

By Alex Wilkins

28 November 2023

Quantum computers need to measure small units of time very accurately

FlashMovie/Getty Images

There is a fundamental trade-off between making a clock accurate and counting ever shorter ticks, due to the second law of thermodynamics. This trade-off could one day be important for clocks in quantum computers, where computing operations occur on extremely short timescales with high accuracy.

A common way of expressing the second law of thermodynamics is that the amount of disorder in a system (its entropy) must always increase over time. As a consequence of this increasing disorder, there is…

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