Overview

In order to promote scientific and industrial complex of Russia, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation has supported the development of transportable optical clocks: project "YBIS"

Project "YBIS" started in October 2017 when leading research centres of Russia have joined their forces: LPI RAS (Moscow), Institute of Laser Physics (Novosibirsk), Skoltech (Moscow), Avesta (Moscow). JSC "Russian Space Systems" is the industrial partner.

"YBIS" is to bring huge potential of quantum technology being developed all over the world to our everyday life and practical use. It includes but not limited to: Satellite navigation, deep space exploration, measuring the change of the world Ocean level and Earth crust displacement.

Geopositioning

Current global navigational satellite systems have the precision of about 1 m. Increasing this precision would require the improvement of these systems' key elements — ground and on-board frequency standards.

Frequency standards

Nowadays all global navigational satellite systems use radio frequency standards that work in a microwave region. Using state of the art optical frequency standards we can transfer them to an optical domain, thus increasing the precision.

Ytterbium

The world best optical frequency standards are based on ytterbium ions, aluminium ions, ytterbium atoms, and strontium atoms. The "YBIS" project chooses ytterbium ions for the transportable optical clocks.