Japanese precision equipment maker Shimadzu Corp. said Wednesday that it has begun selling an optical lattice clock with a deviation of less than one second over 10 billion years, making it the most accurate on the market.

The device measures 114 centimeters in width, 109.3 cm in height and 65 cm in depth. The Kyoto-based maker aims to sell 10 units over three years at a suggested retail price of 500 million yen ($3.3 million) each.

The company started taking orders for the high-precision clock after developing a transportable model in November 2024 in collaboration with researchers from institutions including the University of Tokyo.

Its miniaturization allows the product to be used outdoors, and it could find practical applications in areas such as monitoring movements of the Earth's crust related to plate tectonics, volcanic activity and other phenomena, Shimadzu said.

Invented in 2001 by Hidetoshi Katori, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering, an optical lattice clock has a timekeeping uncertainty hundreds of times smaller than that of cesium atomic clocks that currently define the second.

An optical lattice clock is a candidate for redefining the second, a process scheduled for 2030 by an international organization, the firm said.

==Kyodo

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