Do better clocks really have to burn more energy?

That’s the question Florian Meier and team started with, and what they found might shift how we think about timekeeping at the quantum level. They collaborated with Simon Sundelin and Simone Gasparinetti at 202Q-lab to design a quantum clock in the laboratory based on their findings.

In this Inside the Research video, Florian and Simon walk us through their new paper in Nature Physics, where they describe a quantum clock that doesn’t follow the usual rules. Instead of needing more energy to get more precise, this one uses coherent quantum transport in a specially designed spin chain to get exponentially better precision with the same amount of entropy.

What started as a curious numerical result turned into something deeper: an analytical understanding of why this system works, and what it might mean for the future of quantum devices.

📄 Read the paper Nature Physics 21

📹 Watch the video