OptAsia workshop 2024

The "OptAsia workshop on Time and Frequency Comparisons for timekeeping with optical clocks" was held in Koganei, Japan on December 5-6, 2024.

Partners in the OptAsia collaboration

OptAsia is a research collaboration between the Asian institutes

KRISS, the Korea Research Institute for Standards and Science
AIST/NMIJ, the National Metrology Institute of Japan
A*STAR NMC, the National Metrology Centre in Singapore
NICT, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

It was initiated in 2024 and extends earlier cooperation between KRISS, NMIJ and NICT.

Goals of the OptAsia collaboration

Our collaboration promotes the use of the latest optical clocks for applications that extend beyond the laboratory. To this end, it encourages the exchange of knowledge and optical clock measurements between the participating institutes. Besides confirming the correct operation of the optical clocks, the shared pool of data can also serve as an additional reference and redundancy in generating the timescales that they distribute.

As institutes in Europe and elsewhere establish continent-spanning networks for frequency comparison over optical fiber, the partners in the OptAsia collaboration are looking to advanced techniques for space-borne comparisons to enable similar performance in the Asia-Pacific region.

Workshop program

With support of the NICT International Collaboration Fund, we had the opportunity to arrange a two-day workshop to celebrate the start of the OptAsia collaboration. 24 researchers of nine nationalities from seven research institutes gathered in in Koganei to get to know each other, exchange ideas, and discuss the details of the collaboration.

We are particularly grateful to Dr Antoine Baudiquez, Dr Bin Jian and Dr Laura Sinclair, who traveled from France, Canada and the United States to join the workshop as invited speakers and present new developments in long distance time and frequency comparisons by radio-waves and optical comb pulses. We hope that we all learned a lot from your lectures!

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Lectures and presentations:

WATANABE Soichi, NICT, Japan
"Opening remarks and welcome to NICT"
IDO Tetsuya, NICT, Japan
"Overview of Time and Frequency activity at NICT"
Bin JIAN, NRC (National Research Council), Canada
"Continuous GPS PPP-AR frequency transfer links"
Mads TØNNES, NICT, Japan
"Server structure and results of OptAsia"
YASUDA Masami, NMIJ, Japan
"Overview of Time and Frequency activities at NMIJ"
Won-Kyu LEE, KRISS, Republic of Korea
"Overview of Time and Frequency activities at KRISS"
Joon Hyo RHEE, KRISS, Republic of Korea
"Current status of TWSTFT and GNSS time comparison in KRISS"
Antoine BAUDIQUEZ, BIPM (Internation Bureau of Weights and Measures), France / SYRTE (Department of Space-Time Reference Systems at the Observatoire de Paris), France
"Calculation and comparison of IPPP solutions"
Laura SINCLAIR, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), USA
"Long distance optical time transfer with frequency combs for future intercontinental clock comparisons"
MENG Yusong, NMC, Singapore
"Overviews of Time and Frequency metrology activities in Singapore"
Shilpa MANANDHAR, NMC, Singapore
"Establishing secondary UTC(SG) for resilient Time and Frequency services in Singapore and its applications"

Friday, December 6, 2024

Lectures and presentations:

KOBAYASHI Takumi, NMIJ
"Status report on the optical lattice clock at NMIJ"
Huidong KIM, KRISS
"Frequency offset measurement procedure between the hydrogen maser and the Yb optical clock in KRISS"
HACHISU Hidekazu, NICT
"The strontium optical lattice clock NICT-Sr1"
Nils NEMITZ, NICT
"Network data and status distribution for monitoring an optical clock"
IDO Tetsuya, NICT
"Closing remarks"