“Basically it means you can go from the atoms not interacting at all to interacting very strongly. “It’s kind of crazy that a single atom can be that big, and when you make them that much bigger, they interact much more strongly with each other than they do in their ground states,” Kolkowitz says. This type of atom, known as Rydberg atoms, becomes close to one million times larger than an unexcited counterpart because the excited electron can be microns away from the nucleus. Though the atoms’ are stuck in their own pancake, they can interact with each other if their electrons are highly excited. In the lattice, the atoms are separated into what is effectively a tiny stack of pancakes - each atom can move around within their own flat disk, but they cannot jump into another pancake. To make the clock, they first laser-cool strontium atoms to one millionth of one degree Celsius above absolute zero, then load the atoms into an optical lattice. Kolkowitz is already building an optical atomic clock in his lab, albeit one that is not yet using entangled states. And those are some of the same requirements that are necessary for quantum computing.” “So, you need to engineer a situation where you can make the atoms interact strongly, but you can also switch those interactions off. Entanglement requires these atoms to interact with each other, but a good clock requires them not to interact with each other or anything else,” Kolkowitz says. “That turns out to be hard for a number of reasons. The only way to push the clocks past that limit is to achieve entangled states, strange quantum states where the atoms are no longer independent and they become intertwined. These clocks operate at or near the standard quantum limit, a fundamental limit on performance imposed on clocks where the atoms are all independent of each other.
The improved clocks would allow researchers to ask questions about fundamental physics, and they have applications in improving quantum computing and GPS.Ītomic clocks are so precise because they take advantage of the natural vibration frequencies of atoms, which are identical for all atoms of a particular element. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, UW–Madison physics professor Shimon Kolkowitz proposes to introduce quantum entanglement - where atoms interact with each other even when physically distant - to optical atomic clocks. Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Still, they could be made to be even more precise if they could be pushed past the current limits imposed on them by quantum mechanics. The second stage will aim to create a larger transportable version that can be used in a Navy ship or field unit that is accurate to a nanosecond for up to 30 days without an outside GPS signal.Optical atomic clocks are already the gold standard for precision timekeeping, keeping time so accurately that they would only lose one second every 14 billion years.
Program aims make optical atomic clocks install#
This clock would be small enough to install in a fighter jet or satellite and tough enough to withstand the temperatures, acceleration, and vibrational noise of such an environment.
Program aims make optical atomic clocks portable#
To do this, ROCKn will first look to produce a robust, high-precision small portable optical clock that can maintain picosecond accuracy for 100 seconds at a time. Not only that, they will be more precise and accurate than current state-of-the-art atomic clocks. The goal of DARPA's ROCKn program is to study the basic physics of the principle behind the optical clock and find a way to make optical atomic clocks with low size, weight, and power (SWaP). Such optical atomic clocks have been built, but they're still huge, delicate, room-filling machines that aren't practical for military application. In fact, such optical clocks are so accurate that the most advanced wouldn't gain or lose a second through the entire lifespan of the universe. New Atlas reports: Ignoring a lot of technical details, a conventional atomic clock works by using a beam of microwaves to measure the frequency of the target atoms, but by replacing the microwaves with light, the accuracy is boosted by a factor of 100. DARPA has announced a new initiative called the Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program, which will look to develop a practical, super-accurate optical atomic clock that is robust and small enough to fit inside a military aircraft, warship, or field vehicle.
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