DARPA Making Progress on Miniaturized Atomic Clocks for Future PNT Applications

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Honeywell’s integrated photonic chip technology not only reduces the size, weight, and power of laser delivery systems, but also allows for batch fabrication of complex optical systems with reduced manufacturing cost.

Figure 2: Silicon chip with waveguides and gratings to create a 3D laser beam pattern. In the photo, the light-guiding channels glow from the light they are directing, and the invisible 3D beams coming out of the chip are indicated by a computer-rendered overlay. Source: Honeywell

Finally, a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), with support from researchers at SRI International; University of California, Davis; and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has demonstrated an experimental atomic clock capable of meeting ACES’ target metrics, while proving immune to temperature and environmental issues. Building off research that created the Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC), the team developed an ion-based approach to atom cooling that relies on ionized mercury and ultraviolet lamps instead of lasers. The JPL atomic clock showed an immunity of less than 1 part in 14 decimal places for 1 degree Celsius change. To put that in perspective, that is about 100x better than current CSACs. The use of mercury ions also provides more stability while making the technology less sensitive to magnetic fields and temperature changes.

Figure 3: This photo is of the ACES 10 cc package developed by researchers from NASA’s JPL. Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

As evidenced by the NIST and Honeywell research, progress on the ACES program is generating new means of fabricating atomic clock technologies at wafer scale, which makes continued exploration more cost effective and less reliant on massive engineering endeavors. “Today, we are dealing with complicated optical systems that require massive amounts of engineering whenever you want to iterate on a design. The early progress made on ACES shows that there are viable options in development for doing this same thing without the massive engineering manpower or hefty costs associated with current approaches,” noted Burke.

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