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This English text is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese original is authoritative.
March 18, 2020
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
The University of Tokyo
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation
RIKEN
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT, H.Q.: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Jun Sawada), Professor Hidetoshi Katori with the Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (UTokyo, H.Q.: Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, President: Makoto Gonokami) (concurrently Team Leader at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics and Chief Scientist in the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research), and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation (NTT East, H.Q.: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, President: Fukuzo Inoue) have used commercial fiber networks and telecommunications offices to build a system to transfer optical frequencies between NTT (Atsugi R & D Center), UTokyo (Hongo), and RIKEN (Wako) and demonstrated a transfer accuracy of 1 × 10-18 at an averaging time of 2,600 seconds. NTT and NTT East have developed the world's first laser repeater stations (LRSs) incorporating planar lightwave circuits (PLCs)*1 for a cascaded fiber link*2. This fiber network is stable enough to connect the world's most precise optical lattice clocks*3 developed by UTokyo and RIKEN, which will lead to widespread applications of relativistic geodesy*4 using optical lattice clock networks.
The paper describing this work will be published in "Optics Express", a US scientific journal of The Optical Society of America (OSA), on March 17, 2020 (US time)**.
This work was partly funded by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (JP16H06284) and by JST-Mirai Program (JPMJMI18A1), Japan.
This work was performed as part of a project to construct a nationwide optical lattice clock network in Japan. Optical lattice clocks can achieve a frequency accuracy exceeding that cesium atomic clocks (the current time/frequency standards defining the unit of time "second") and are thus promising candidates for the next generation of time/frequency standards. In addition, because such high-precision optical lattice clocks are sensitive to gravitational potential, using them for geodesy is attracting attention as an application that goes beyond the conventional concept of clocks (Fig. 1). According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a clock placed at a lower position ticks slowly due to the gravitational potential of the Earth. A clock with an accuracy of 10-18 can determine a height difference of one centimeter. Remote clocks connected through an optical fiber network are expected to provide new time-space information infrastructures, such as quantum benchmarks and quantum sensors for crustal deformation.
Realizing such clock networks requires optical fiber links that are stable enough to connect optical lattice clocks. Scalability of the fiber length is also important for a nationwide clock network. A fundamental experiment was demonstrated in 2017 [Takano et al., Nature Photonics 10, 662 (2016)], where two optical lattice clocks placed at UTokyo (Hongo) and RIKEN (Wako)were operated by a single laser shared by a 30-km-long optical fiber link.
In the present work, we demonstrated a 240-km-long optical fiber link, which corresponds to a prefecture-level network, with an accuracy of 10-18.
Three laboratories-one at NTT, one at UTokyo, and the other at Riken-located within a 100-km region were connected by optical telecommunications fibers, and shared a highly stable laser with a wavelength of 1397 nm, twice the wavelength of the lasers used for strontium optical lattice clocks. To achieve this, we developed a cascaded fiber link with ultralow-noise laser repeater stations (LRSs) incorporating planar lightwave circuits (PLCs). We demonstrated optical frequency transfer via a 240-km-long fiber with a frequency stability*4 of 3×10-16 at an averaging time of one second and 1×10-18 at 2,600 seconds. This stability is high enough to connect the world's most precise optical lattice clocks developed by UTokyo and RIKEN, which will lead to widespread applications of relativistic geodesy using optical lattice clock networks.
We are planning to demonstrate an optical lattice clock network using the 200-km-level optical fiber link developed in this work. We also plan to extend this ultrahigh-precision optical-frequency transfer technology to the 1000-km level and develop an experimental environment for a nationwide optical clock network.
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