Clock Synchronization with Weakly Correlated Photons
Quantum Physics
2026-02-23 v1
Abstract
Clock synchronization is necessary for communication and distributed computing tasks. Previous schemes based on photon timing correlations use pulsed light or photon pairs for their strong timing correlations. In this work, we demonstrate successful synchronization of crystal clocks using weakly time-correlated photons of 180 ns coherence time from a bunched light source. A synchronization timing jitter of 10 ns is achieved over symmetric -102 dB optical channel loss between two parties, over a span of 25 hours. We also present a model that gives better estimates to the coherence peak finding success probabilities under low signal.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.18147,
title = {Clock Synchronization with Weakly Correlated Photons},
author = {Justin Yu Xiang Peh and Darren Ming Zhi Koh and Zifang Xu and Xi Jie Yeo and Peng Kian Tan and Christian Kurtsiefer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18147},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
8 pages, 5 figures