“For a few years now, there’s been work on developing a new breed of atomic clock called an optical clock,” Andrew Ludlow, the NIST physicist who led the project, told Digital Trends. Their latest atomic clock, the most accurate ever created, can tell the time with an astonishing 18 digits of precision. But it’s possible for clocks to get a whole lot more accurate - and a clock built by researchers from National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, proves it. The consortium received a €7.5 million European Commission Horizon grant to achieve their goals over the next three and a half years.Whether it’s timing runners in a race, cooking dinner, or trying to get to the airport on time, the standard minutes, seconds, and milliseconds found on most digital clocks are more than enough to keep folks on schedule. This will allow real-world applications like significantly improved and faster telecommunication networks, or underground exploration using fluctuations in gravity. The AQuRA-consortium brings together European universities, industry partners and EU metrology institutes in an effort to make quantum clocks more robust and compact. Currently, these so-called optical atomic clocks are mostly found in physics laboratories, often filling an entire laboratory. Modern atomic quantum clocks are the most precise and accurate scientific instruments ever created. AQuRA (the Advanced Quantum Clock for Real World Applications) is an industry led consortium with 10 partners from across Europe who will collaborate over the next three and a half years to make state of the art laboratory clocks robust and compact enough for real world applications. Today a new project built on the achievements of iqClock kicked off. If you want to know more about iqClock, don't hesitate to contact us!ġ December 2022: AQuRA project commences as well as an overview of media appearances and materials.
On this website, you will find our latest news, an overview of the project's tasks, a more detailed description of the twelve partner institutes that make the project possible, lists of publications and open positions. IqClock is one of 20 quantum technology related projects that together form the European Commission's Quantum Flagship initiative. We are developing optical clocks that operate after a new principle, a bit like a laser, and that have the potential to become simpler and more robust than the current clock generation. The second challenge we tackle is the complexity of the clock itself. This could for example make GPS systems much more accurate. iqClock wants to make these clocks transportable, so that they can be used for measurements in the field and eventually even sent to space using satellites. Currently, these clocks do not look like the clocks in your home – they are complicated machines that fill entire laboratories. The first is to make existing optical clocks smaller and more robust. IqClock tackles two major challenges to reach its goal.
If such a clock would have been turned on during the Big Bang, almost fourteen billion years ago, the clock would still be ahead or behind less than a single second today! These "optical atomic clocks" are amazingly accurate. The goal of iqClock is to bring the best clocks in the world to society.
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