Portable Atomic Clock Team awarded NMI Measurement Impact and People's Choice Awards

On Friday, August 18, The University of Adelaide Portable Atomic Clock Team represented by Dr Rachel Offer from the University’s Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, won the NMI Measurement Impact award for measurement-related achievements demonstrating real-world impact. The team won for their world-first deployable, autonomous optical atomic clocks. The team also won the People's Choice award.

The Portable Atomic Clocks team at the University of Adelaide is made up of 10 core early-career researchers and engineers who have been working to develop alternative secure and independent sources of time for Defence.

These clock technologies provide independent and assured timing signals in GPS-denied environments. They also deliver signals that outperform timing derived from GPS by many orders of magnitude.

Keeping accurate time to navigate has been a problem for centuries, including at sea. Most modern timing systems rely on satellite-based solutions, but these are vulnerable if that connection is lost. Tested on a naval vessel off Pearl Harbour in military exercises earlier this year, the team’s portable optical clocks proved to be vastly superior to current defence technologies. The clocks are the first of their kind to operate outside a laboratory.

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