Holly Leopardi

So this is Building 33. We're going to walk into the quest lab.

Kind of the classic first mistake that, you know, when you walk into an undergraduate physics lab is they make a nice aligned optical system and they don't screw the mirrors and things down on the table and then they move.

Each satellite emits a timing signal and you receive those timing signals on your GPS receiver on your phone. And from those timing signals, it triangulates where you are. So GPS is kind of like a clock? GPS is all clocks. And so if we have better clocks on GPS, we would know our location to higher degrees of accuracy.

GPS, internet timing protocol, stock trading, all of these things rely on more accurate systems.

And then the Earth says, OK, your clock is this has accumulated this much error. It's this much seconds off or time off. And then they send another signal back.

Mm-hmm.

Which is something that swings back and forth.

But those clocks are accurate to the 10 to the minus. The best ones are 10 minus 16. Right.

Instead of going from shining microwave light on the atoms, we can go shine optical light or use lasers on the atoms. We can get to 10 to the minus 17, 10 to the minus 18, and even 10 to the minus 19. So these are... you know, up to three orders of magnitude improved over current microwave clocks.

So my goal is to have a clock network in space. especially an optical clock network, because when you start getting down to the 17th, 18th, 19th and beyond level of precision, digit of precision, you can start doing really cool fundamental physics.

And you could start looking for how does gravitation and quantum mechanics interact? Can we understand dark matter interactions, things like that?

The field wants this, and it would take a lot of academics, a lot of companies, a lot of even nations to make this happen. It's bigger than just me and my lab.

So this is Building 33. We're going to walk into the quest lab.