Related papers: Measuring Time with Minimal Clocks

Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we…

A fundamental description of time can be consistent not only with the usual monotonic behavior but also with a periodic physical clock variable, coupled to the degrees of freedom of a system evolving in time. Generically, one would in fact…

Measuring time means counting the occurrence of periodic phenomena. Over the past centuries a major effort was put to make stable and precise oscillators to be used as clock regulators. Here we consider a different class of clocks based on…

Understanding different aspects of time is at the core of many areas in theoretical physics. Minimal models of continuous stochastic and quantum clocks have been proposed to explore fundamental limitations on the performance of timekeeping…

All clocks, classical or quantum, are open non equilibrium irreversible systems subject to the constraints of thermodynamics. Using examples I show that these constraints necessarily limit the performance of clocks and that good clocks…

Circadian clocks are the central timekeepers of life, allowing cells to anticipate changes between day and night. Experiments in recent years have revealed that circadian clocks can be highly stable, raising the question how reliably they…

Time plays a fundamental role in our ability to make sense of the physical laws in the world around us. The nature of time has puzzled people -- from the ancient Greeks to the present day -- resulting in a long running debate between…

We show that finite physical clocks always have well-behaved signals, namely that every waiting-time distribution generated by a physical process on a system of finite size is guaranteed to be bounded by a decay envelope. Following this…

In classical physics, clocks are open dissipative systems driven from thermal equilibrium and necessarily subject to thermal noise. We describe a quantum clock driven by entropy reduction through measurement. The mechanism consists of a…

According to general relativity, clocks are the basic measuring devices needed to probe spacetime geometry. However, it is generally accepted that the mass of clocks capable of measuring small time intervals must be bounded from below. In…

Optical atomic clocks represent the state-of-the-art in the frontier of modern measurement science. In this article we provide a detailed review on the development of optical atomic clocks that are based on trapped single ions and many…

Many measurements on soft condensed matter (e.g., biological and materials) systems track low-dimensional observables projected from the full system phase space as a function of time. Examples are dynamic structure factors, spectroscopic…

Time remains one of the least well understood concepts in physics, most notably in quantum mechanics. A central goal is to find the fundamental limits of measuring time. One of the main obstacles is the fact that time is not an observable…

Circadian clocks exhibit the robustness of period and plasticity of phase against environmental changes such as temperature and nutrient conditions. Thus far, however, it is unclear how both are simultaneously achieved. By investigating…

Clocks are a central part of many computing paradigms, and are mainly used to synchronise the delicate operation of switching, necessary to drive modern computational processes. Unfortunately, this synchronisation process is reaching a…

The dynamics of an unique type of clock mechanism known as grasshopper escapement is investigated with the aim of evaluating its accuracy in a noisy environment. It is demonstrated that the clock's precision scales linearly with the rate of…

We present a derivation of the structure and dynamics of a ticking clock by showing that for finite systems a single natural principle serves to distinguish what we understand as ticking clocks from time-keeping systems in general. As a…

A clock is, from an information-theoretic perspective, a system that emits information about time. One may therefore ask whether the theory of information imposes any constraints on the maximum precision of clocks. Here we show a…

In trapped-atom clocks, the primary source of decoherence is often the phase noise of the oscillator. For this case, we derive theoretical performance gains by combining several atomic ensembles. For example, M ensembles of N atoms can be…

Matrix clocks are a generalization of the notion of vector clocks that allows the local representation of causal precedence to reach into an asynchronous distributed computation's past with depth $x$, where $x\ge 1$ is an integer.…