LANDFORCES — The Australian military has awarded a physics startup two contracts for a quantum clock designed to provide greater accuracy and a week or more of GPS coverage if conventional GPS is jammed or attacked.
The deals, announced here this morning, mean Australia will buy QuantX Labs’ quantum optical atomic clocks “to support superior decision advantage and enhanced maritime domain awareness” for the Australian Defense Force, an ADF statement said.
The head of operations for QuantX, Sandy Sinclair, said the announcement of the $2.7 million ($1.8 million USD) in deals “is worth writing about because it’s the first demonstration of quantum technology under AUKUS Pillar II.”
The ADF statement carefully notes that these “are key objectives under AUKUS Pillar II,” but it does not claim that they are being done as part of the second pillar, which focuses on a range of advanced technologies, including quantum, artificial intelligence and autonomy.
“Defense will increasingly leverage emerging disruptive technologies such as quantum to provide a capability edge for the warfighter,” Chief Defence Scientist Tanya Monro said in a statement. “This is the first sale for QuantX Labs and a prime example of the collaborative relationships needed to transition leading-edge sovereign research into advanced operational capabilities for the Australian Defence Force.”
Last year, the US Air Force Research Laboratory, the US Navy, and foreign partners from the Five Eyes alliance collaborated to test quantum tech at sea during the annual Rim of the Pacific exercises. Few details were released at the time.
The portable atomic clocks are the result of more than seven years of research and development at the Institute of Photonics and Advanced Sensing at the University of Adelaide.
“So we’re offering very similar performance to a hydrogen maser, which already exists, but in a much smaller form factor,” Sinclair told Breaking Defense. “We will be accelerating that performance over the next couple of years in future iterations of the clock to a much better performance.”
QuantX’s clock uses a laser on rubidium molecules, targeting one to “excite” it and then the “physics package” emits a persistent radio frequency signal.
Testing for the tech, the ADF statement said, will focus on “operational resilience in global positioning systems (GPS) degraded environments.” In the event of attacks on the GPS network the Quantx clock should be able to provide signals for a week or more, Sinclair said. Militaries the world over have been racing to find alternatives to GPS, assuming that in the next conflict they’re be operating where GPS is unavailable, whether naturally or due to enemy interference.
The box containing the clock and its lasers will be part of a mobile test and measurement system, delivered in early 2025. The size of the clock is a major part of the company’s success. They’ve reduced it to the size big enough for four servers and it will soon, Sinclair said, shrink to only three server slots in size.
