How to Use atomic clock in a Sentence

atomic clock

noun
  • There was a time when atomic clocks looked like pretty hot stuff.
    — David Szondy, New Atlas, 12 Jan. 2025
  • After all, your ovaries and uterus are not like an atomic clock.
    — Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, 5 Feb. 2023
  • These are the people who maintain the atomic clocks that keep all our phones on the right time.
    — National Geographic, 17 Mar. 2017
  • So an atomic clock on the moon would go at a faster pace than an atomic clock here on Earth.
    — Caralin Nunes, The Arizona Republic, 24 Apr. 2024
  • And this is where the optical atomic clock’s secret weapon kicks in.
    — New York Times, 25 Apr. 2022
  • The moon is less massive than Earth, thus atomic clocks on its surface tick faster.
    — Becky Ferreira, WIRED, 4 Sep. 2024
  • So, don’t expect the timeline to proceed like an atomic clock.
    — Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, 13 Aug. 2023
  • Today’s atomic clocks keep time by tracking changes in an atom’s electrons.
    — Andrei Derevianko, The Conversation, 14 Apr. 2026
  • Upgrades to atomic clock lasers may give us a more precise measurement of the second.
    — Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 26 Apr. 2022
  • The world’s smallest atomic clock has just hit the market, for a cool $1,500.
    — Veronique Greenwood, Discover Magazine, 4 May 2011
  • At their core, atomic clocks and nuclear clocks work using the same principle.
    — Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 11 Sep. 2024
  • One of the experiments will be an extremely cold atomic clock.
    — Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 12 Dec. 2022
  • For decades, atomic clocks have provided the most stable means of timekeeping.
    — Perri Thaler, IEEE Spectrum, 17 Dec. 2025
  • But scientists who track and operate atomic clocks may be facing a bit of a predicament.
    — James Powel, USA Today, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Parkinson says this third change was the most risky—atomic clocks that could handle space radiation did not yet exist.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 19 Apr. 2018
  • Rather than a fancy atomic clock or rat cyborgs, for instance, this tech story deals with buckets of rocks and water.
    — Bill Andrews, Discover Magazine, 6 Mar. 2019
  • Researchers have recorded the shortest day on Earth since the invention of the atomic clock.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 Aug. 2022
  • The fastest pulsars, spinning hundreds of times per second, make excellent clocks—on par with the best atomic clocks.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 28 June 2023
  • Then came the era of highly precise atomic clocks, which proved a much more stable way of defining a physical second.
    — Laura Paddison, CNN, 27 Mar. 2024
  • Satellites in these networks carry atomic clocks that resolve time within a few billionths of a second.
    — Becky Ferreira, WIRED, 4 Sep. 2024
  • All clocks, from pendulums to quartz watches to atomic clocks, rely on a stable repeating event.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 17 Nov. 2025
  • Scientists recorded the shortest day on Earth since the invention of the atomic clock.
    — Megan Marples, CNN, 8 Aug. 2022
  • At its center are atomic clocks, which measure the passage of time by tracking the quantum transitions of electrons.
    — Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, 29 Oct. 2024
  • The most precise atomic clocks trap atoms in an optical lattice, a pattern of light and dark formed by intersecting lasers.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 4 Apr. 2026
  • An atomic clock must be hyper-precise for travel through deep space, where everything is bigger and mistakes quickly can add up.
    — Scottie Andrew, CNN, 28 Aug. 2019
  • Using atomic clocks on the satellites, the signal indicates when it was transmitted.
    — Samantha Masunaga, latimes.com, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Strontium cycles much faster than cesium does, and that would make such an atomic clock even more precise by giving researchers even more data points to work with.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 18 Jan. 2018
  • Using this energy to calibrate a clock, like atomic clocks do, does not come without consequence, though.
    — Andrei Derevianko, The Conversation, 14 Apr. 2026
  • This yields a 100-fold improvement over the cesium fountain clock, the gold standard for microwave atomic clocks.
    — Andrew Ludlow, The Conversation, 22 May 2020
  • Closer to home, physicists study vibrations of atoms, such as those used in atomic clocks, to look for deviations from pure constancy.
    — Paul Sutter, Space.com, 23 May 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'atomic clock.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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