Press Release: World's First Ultra-fast Time Synchronization with Relativistic Cosmic Rays

When we think about time synchronization, movies like “Back to the Future” might come to mind; it’s common to see a scene where 2 characters in a movie synchronize their watches before an action scene where timing is vital to the mission. Usually there is a shot of the two wrist watches (or a watch and a clock) next to each other where the characters check visually to see that the second hands or digital numbers are moving in unison. In the case of the movie “Back to the Future”, we suspend our disbelief in order to accept the idea that a simple alarm clock, synchronized with 2 wrist watches, can be precise enough to reach the speed and position for the burst of energy from a lightning bolt to reach the flux capacitor in the time machine at the correct moment.

Summary of the paper: Hiroyuki K.M. Tanaka. “Cosmic time synchronizer (CTS) for wireless and precise time synchronization using extended air showers.” Scientific Reports

However, in the real world as technologies and automated infrastructures continue to grow in complexity, simply comparing two watches visually is not precise enough for time synchronization. We have reached a point, especially in the last decade, where time synchronization at around the scale of sub-microsecond is becoming the standard for many aspects of local/global economies, social infrastructures and daily life as we enter 5G era. In many cases, time synchronization is also strongly linked to being able to determine a precise position (in terms of navigation), as is the case with GPS.

We already have atomic clocks and GPS, however these solutions are plagued with issues that make them sometimes unsuitable, unreliable, inaccurate, and/or too costly in some situations. For example, atomic clocks are very reliable but too costly to use everywhere. By connecting one atomic clock on a satellite with GPS connectivity for several users, this cost can be managed, however the traffic between the user and satellite can be interrupted or manipulated by jamming and spoofing attacks or other errors. Also, GPS cannot function properly in subterranean, underwater or indoor environments.

The muographic technique, CTS (Cosmic Time Synchronization), offers an alternative or backup to GPS and other time synchronization solutions used today. A new paper, “First experimental results of the cosmic time synchronizer for a wireless, precise, and perpetual time synchronization system” presents results from researchers at VMI, the University of Tokyo, Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica, Fermi Research Center (CREF), CERN, and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare to conduct the first experimental evaluation of a CTS daisy chain network. This preliminary test successfully reached ~30 nanosecond accuracy (SD, 1 σ) for time synchronization between its hub and units situated 50-60 meters away from each other in an indoor environment (through 30cm of concrete, which is impossible for GPS signals to penetrate through).

Dense CTS sensor networks could realize a highly secured wireless time synchronization system for all of the sectors within a city more precisely than any legacy wireless technique. This is a conceptual view of a secured time synchronization scheme with 2 intra-city CTS networks and an inter-city wired connection.

An effective application of CTS would be in intra-city systems including, for example, areas inside buildings, underwater tunnels, and subways, which are normally only accessible via optical cables, for the purpose of financial transactions, factory robot control/regulation, electric power management, homeland security, scientific experiments, and Time Metrology Applications. Also, it is highly secure, flexible, and can be used in tandem with (or as a backup for) other time synchronization or time keeping systems.