Sapphire clock earns new tick of approval

The Sapphire Cryogenic Clock made by Adelaide timing and quantum sensing business QuantX Labs has passed through full acceptance testing and is ready for inclusion in the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN). 

The company’s General Manager, Dr Martin O’Connor, told @AuManufacturing last week that it is about to build four prototypes to be tested in live operations. If successful, it would supply up to ten more of these systems for inclusion across radars at the three JORN sites, which are used in surveillance of Australia’s northern approaches.

“Three years ago we started working with BAE Systems. Our work with BAE was a culmination of seven years of work with defence, particularly on this one sapphire clock technology,” O’Connor tells us.

“The way it enhances the performance for JORN, which is looking over the horizon, 3,000 kilometres or more [is] the information about the target is encoded in the return signal. So you can imagine that the return signal has information about a target but also information about clutter – all the background noise. And the ability to discriminate the target from the clutter is enhanced by using a more pure frequency source.” 

The flagship product being used produces the purest frequency signal on the planet, and is based on a cryogenic sapphire oscillator developed by company co-founder Professor Andre Luiten during PhD work in the 1990s.   

The team’s work on the clock – so precise will lose only a second over 40 million years – earned it a Eureka prize in 2018.

In a podcast of @AuManufacturing Conversations with Brent Balinski, O’Connor explains the usefulness of the device in JORN (currently undergoing a $1.2 billion Phase 6 upgrade led by BAE Systems Australia) shares some thoughts on what it takes for successful applied research by universities, and tells us why alternatives to GPS are being developed.

From:  https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/sapphire-clock-earns-another-tick-of-approval