PTB > Thematic tours > Questions about time > With what accuracy do PTB's atomic clocks work?
For the comparison of the atomic clocks constructed at PTB, the rate errors are 1 to 3 billionths of a second per day (for comparison: a quartz wrist watch has a monthly inaccuracy of a few seconds, mechanical watches - no matter how expensive they may be! – are wrong by a multiple of this). In physical terms, for CS2 from which the legal time is derived, the uncertainty has been estimated at 12x10–15 (This means that over the course of a year, an error of one millionth of a second must be reckoned with relative to an ideal clock.) With the cesium fountain, an even smaller uncertainty, namely 1x10–15, is achieved. It has also been proved that the seconds of two fountains (of NIST/U.S.A. and of PTB) differ by no more than 1x10–15.