Why tiny atomic clocks may hold the key to China mass-producing cheap swarm drones

2026.03.19 04:20 The team’s atomic clock, which is said to lose only a second every 30,000 years. Photo: Handout Timing is everything in modern warfare, where even a nanosecond’s delay can make the difference between hitting or missing a target in a coordinated drone or missile attack. China may now have taken a major step forward in this field with the mass production of the world’s smallest atomic clock – something the researchers behind it say could transform drone warfare, underwater navigation and battlefield communication. Developed by a research team led by Professor Chen Jiehua from Wuhan University’s Satellite Navigation and Positioning Technology Research Centre, the clock only loses a second every 30,000 years, according to the official newspaper Changjiang Daily. The device measures just 2.3 cubic cm (0.14 cubic inch), less than one-seventh the size of the leading US models and about the size of a fingernail. “Even if traditional atomic clocks are miniaturised, the minimum volume limit is still several hundred cubic centimetres and the minimum power consumption is at least several watts,” Chen told the newspaper. According to Chen, the US has produced a 17 cubic cm product, but his team’s clock has a comparable performance even though it is much smaller. “We have achieved mass production of chip-scale atomic clocks, successfully applying them to time synchronisation systems such as micro-PNT [positioning, navigation and timing], underwater BeiDou [China’s equivalent of GPS], low-orbit satellites and drone swarms. “Thanks to its compact size and low power consumption, this new product holds broad market prospects.” The miniaturisation is possible because the team uses a quantum optical phenomenon known as coherent population trapping, rather than the microwave cavity technique used in earlier atomic clocks. In conventional atomic clocks, microwaves interact with atoms in a resonant cavity to generate a stable frequency reference, but this imposes physical

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