3 ms·

> It's an amazing time to be alive. While not this precise, you can have atomic cesium beam clocks of your own for a few thousand dollars each, and some elbow g

> It's an amazing time to be alive. While not this precise, you can have atomic cesium beam clocks of your own for a few thousand dollars each, and some elbow grease. How hard or expensive would it be for a reasonably equipped lab to build their own optical clock though? I see there are optical clocks the size of few rack units on the market for a rather hefty price, are the materials needed that expensive or is it just the expertise?

wbl 1y ago
Expertise
CamperBob2 1y ago
What keeps your average home experimenter from building an optical clock is the fact that femtosecond combs are still way too expensive and exotic. Some progress has been made -- you can get them from ThorLabs, for instance ( https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=11422 https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=11... ) -- but they are still in the "Call for pricing and lead time" category. Once optical comb sources are commoditized to the extent that solid-state lasers are now, a lot of fun stuff will become possible.
- pumphaus 1y ago
  Heh, I would not ever have expected to see my company mentioned on HN. I'm the software tech lead at Menlo Systems, we're building those frequency combs that Thorlabs sells. Re the commoditization: Part of the problem is that customers, especially the scientific ones, don't want "commodity" frequency combs. Nearly every comb we sell is tailored to the specific customer in one way or another. Industrial customers start to be interested in frequency combs more and more. I guess this will be the clientele that values off-the-shelf products more, eventually paving the way for commoditization.
  - nativeit 1y ago
    The presence of individuals such as yourself is what makes the HN comments such a frequently meaningful place to find insightful discussions. Thanks for the context!!
- brennanpeterson 1y ago
  We aren't far at all from on chip combs or pseudo combs, and that will be fine. More for sensors generally, but you can also have your clocks.
cjbillington 1y ago
The lasers alone set you back many tens of k so it's not really possible to do on the cheap presently, even if a lot of the cost is expertise and the high overhead of R&D costs when only producing small number of units. Oh and to know if it's any good you have to either build two (ideally more) of them to compare against each other (ideally using different approaches so their errors are less correlated), or have access to a clock better than the one you're building to compare to. So you can rarely get away with building just one if you want to know if you've succeeded. Source: I work on the software for these portable optical clocks: https://phys.org/news/2025-07-quantum-clocks-accuracy-current-gps.html https://phys.org/news/2025-07-quantum-clocks-accuracy-curren...

wbl 1y ago

Expertise

CamperBob2 1y ago

What keeps your average home experimenter from building an optical clock is the fact that femtosecond combs are still way too expensive and exotic. Some progress has been made -- you can get them from ThorLabs, for instance ( https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=11422 https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=11... ) -- but they are still in the "Call for pricing and lead time" category. Once optical comb sources are commoditized to the extent that solid-state lasers are now, a lot of fun stuff will become possible.

pumphaus 1y ago
Heh, I would not ever have expected to see my company mentioned on HN. I'm the software tech lead at Menlo Systems, we're building those frequency combs that Thorlabs sells. Re the commoditization: Part of the problem is that customers, especially the scientific ones, don't want "commodity" frequency combs. Nearly every comb we sell is tailored to the specific customer in one way or another. Industrial customers start to be interested in frequency combs more and more. I guess this will be the clientele that values off-the-shelf products more, eventually paving the way for commoditization.
- nativeit 1y ago
  The presence of individuals such as yourself is what makes the HN comments such a frequently meaningful place to find insightful discussions. Thanks for the context!!
brennanpeterson 1y ago
We aren't far at all from on chip combs or pseudo combs, and that will be fine. More for sensors generally, but you can also have your clocks.

cjbillington 1y ago

The lasers alone set you back many tens of k so it's not really possible to do on the cheap presently, even if a lot of the cost is expertise and the high overhead of R&D costs when only producing small number of units. Oh and to know if it's any good you have to either build two (ideally more) of them to compare against each other (ideally using different approaches so their errors are less correlated), or have access to a clock better than the one you're building to compare to. So you can rarely get away with building just one if you want to know if you've succeeded. Source: I work on the software for these portable optical clocks: https://phys.org/news/2025-07-quantum-clocks-accuracy-current-gps.html https://phys.org/news/2025-07-quantum-clocks-accuracy-curren...