Three-Node Optical Time Synchronization

The ability to communicate precise time and frequency signals between distant locations, i.e. time synchronization, serves as the basis for several applications, including navigation, geodesy, and general-relativity experiments. To achieve the best time synchronization precision reported to date, methods utilizing optical frequency combs have been demonstrated with performance down to femtoseconds and below. We have been implementing a 3-node optical time synchronization system with the ability to steer two independent remote nodes to a central reference node with femtosecond time transfer precision. We will describe our implementation and present performance measurements. This work will serve as a springboard for multi-node optical time synchronization implementations anticipated in future work.