Trap Some Mercury, Make a Clock (Maybe)

“Trapping of Neutral Mercury Atoms and Prospects for Optical Lattice Clocks” Hachisu et al., PRL, 100(5). I haven’t had time to read the paper, but Chad at Uncertain Principles has a summary of it.

My personal nit is that everybody calls these clocks, and they are really frequency standards/references. But almost nobody cares about that.