Comparing optical oscillators across the air to milliradians in phase and $10^{-17}$ in frequency

Abstract

We demonstrate carrier-phase optical two-way time-frequency transfer (carrier-phase OTWTFT) through the two-way exchange of frequency comb pulses. Carrier-phase OTWTFT achieves frequency comparisons with a residual instability of 1.2x10${}^{-17}$ at 1 second across a turbulent 4-km free space link, surpassing previous OTWTFT by 10-20x and enabling future high-precision optical clock networks. Furthermore, by exploiting the carrier-phase, this approach is able to continuously track changes in the relative optical phase of distant optical oscillators to 9 mrad (7 attoseconds) at 1-sec averaging, effectively extending optical phase coherence over a broad spatial network for applications such as correlated spectroscopy between distant atomic clocks.

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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Micius quantum experiments in space
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• 113 km Free-Space Time-Frequency Dissemination at the 19th Decimal Instability
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• Femtosecond Synchronization of Optical Clocks Off of a Flying Quadcopter
• Photonic flywheel in a monolithic fiber resonator
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• Towards satellite-based quantum-secure time transfer
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• Picosecond-precision optical time transfer in free space using flexible binary offset carrier modulation
• Cold Atoms in Space: Community Workshop Summary and Proposed Road-Map
• Testing Lorentz symmetry with space-based gravitational-wave detectors
• Phase-coherent asynchronous optical sampling system
• Laser-based underwater transfer of radio-frequency clock signal with electronic phase compensation