RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
From Research to Reality
High-performance cold-atom sensors
AOSense designs, fabricates, and tests high-performance cold atom sensors for inertial navigation, gravity measurement, and time and frequency standards. We are dedicated to commercializing these technologies for defense, industrial, and scientific applications. Cold atom sensors can be tailored to a wide range of applications and often outperform traditional sensors by orders of magnitude. AOSense can also provide component-level building blocks such as lasers and atom sources. Please contact us to discuss your precision sensor needs.
INERTIAL SENSORS
Precise navigation
Navigating in environments where GPS is unavailable or actively denied is a critical challenge for modern military and commercial platforms. Currently, AOSense is designing and building high-performance inertial sensors for precision navigation in the absence of any external signals. AOSense can provide numerous inertial sensor configurations customized for specific military and industrial requirements, including gyroscopes, accelerometers, and inertial measurement units (IMU).
TIME & FREQUENCY STANDARDS
Timekeeping
Precise time and frequency standards are needed for modern communication, radar, and navigation systems. Recently, lab-based optical atomic clocks have demonstrated orders-of-magnitude improved performance over traditional microwave standards that are used in GPS. This performance improvement is due to the higher quality factor for optical atomic transitions. Currently, AOSense is developing portable optical frequency standards and self-referenced frequency combs designed for simplicity and ruggedness. Parallel efforts seek to improve upon microwave clocks by implementing techniques such as laser cooling and trapping.
GEODETIC & GEOPHYSICAL SENSORS
Gravity measurement
High-performance gravimeters and gravity gradiometers are well-suited for geophysical surveying, including oil and mineral exploration, underground fluid monitoring, and mapping terrain. Such sensors may also be useful for geodetic studies of Earth’s gravitational potential, identifying special nuclear materials, treaty verification, and void detection. AOSense has built and demonstrated cold atom sensors for measuring gravity and gravity gradients, including a compact gravimeter that we shipped to an aerospace customer.