**Summary**
Dr. Laura Sinclair has been awarded the 2024 Arthur S. Flemming Award for her groundbreaking work in femtosecond free-space optical time-transfer at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). She pioneered a method that enables unprecedented precision in timekeeping, improving it by a thousand-fold over traditional GPS-based methods.
Sinclair’s innovation integrates fast digital signal processing with Nobel Prize-winning laser technology to achieve attosecond control of light fields, breaking the picosecond barrier. This breakthrough will facilitate global timing networks with accuracy on par with one second every 32 million years, opening up new possibilities in distributed black hole imaging, quantum networks, advanced navigation, and chronometric geodesy.
**Key Points:**
– **Femtosecond Free-Space Optical Time-Transfer**: A novel method for precise timekeeping.
– **Nobel Prize-Winning Laser Technology**: Used to achieve attosecond control of light fields.
– **Global Timing Networks**: Will have accuracies on par with one second every 32 million years.
– **Applications:** Distributed black hole imaging, quantum networks, advanced navigation, and chronometric geodesy.
Implementation timeframe:
The article does not provide specific implementation timelines but mentions ongoing research efforts led by Dr. Sinclair’s team at NIST.
Current status:
Proposed as part of Dr. Sinclair’s pioneering work; currently under development or refinement within the field of optical clock-based timekeeping standards
Source: https://www.nist.gov/awards/laura-sinclair-receives-2024-arthur-s-flemming-award
Keywords: optical, femtosecond, timekeeping
