Together with six other colleagues, Prof. Tony Apollaro, Associate Professor at the Department of Physics within the University’s Faculty of Science, has recently successfully published a paper in Nature Physics, one of the most prestigious and influential journals in the scientific world.
Titled , the study is about the longstanding belief of researchers that improving clock precision inevitably requires more energy waste (entropy) being challenged by a quantum model—a ring of interacting particles called spins. The scientists involved show that clock precision can grow exponentially faster than the entropy those clocks emit.
How It Works
Imagine a circular chain of tiny quantum components. A single “excitation” (think of it like a single tick of movement) travels around the ring, causing each step in the cycle to act as one tick of the clock.
Only one part of the ring is connected to the “outside world” and lets energy leak out—this leakage is what produces entropy. The rest of the ring remains perfectly isolated to keep the process clean.
Traditional systems need entropy to keep increasing for each gain in accuracy. Here, thanks to the ring’s quantum coherence, the paper shows that even modest entropy release can yield huge boosts in precision—breaking the old linear trade-off.
Why It Matters
This finding helps unravel how time and thermodynamics relate at the quantum level, showing previous limits might not apply in quantum-enabled systems.
It could inspire new designs for high-precision, energy-efficient quantum devices—like clocks, sensors, and photon sources—especially useful in quantum computing and secure communications.
The classic view held that better precision always means more wasted energy. This study flips that assumption, revealing that cleverly engineered quantum systems can do much better, achieving higher precision without a matching increase in entropy.
