The most important part of one of the most precise clocks in the world is a paper-thin, staple-size piece of lutetium. ... Murray Barrett didn’t aspire to be a clockmaker. After completing his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2002, where he studied atomic physics, he did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NIST in the quantum computing and information program. Barrett did his Ph.D. under the direction of Michael Chapman.