Our ability to study everything from marsquakes to black holes is contingent on our ability to calibrate and sync our measuring devices. Getting things in sync is strangely one of our greatest challenges. This is due to the limits of relativity and our own technical limitations. If I say sync, different people in the room with me will hear the word “sync” at different times because of the speed of sound. If I flash a light, they will get the light at different times too. 

Ideally, you want systems to have a myriad of things to sync up on and the chance to constantly update timing to stay in sync, and a way to do that is suggested in a new paper in Scientific Reports. Researchers are looking at using atmospheric cosmic ray events to synchronize clocks on and below the surface of our planet. When some forms of cosmic rays strike the atmosphere, they trigger a cascade of readily detectable muons, a kind of particle that can travel through the air, earth, and water – and probably fire, too – but we try not to test that in the lab.

These events are occurring on a regular basis all over the globe but are separated in time enough that a suite of detectors under an event will be able to know, “I just saw the same event as that detector over there,” and use the event to sync the time. This is fairly low-cost, completely straightforward, and, the authors of this work point out, the only barrier to using this technique is getting folks to… use this technique.

I, for one, look forward to a muon-synced future.

More Information

The University of Tokyo press release

“Cosmic time synchronizer (CTS) for wireless and precise time synchronization using extended air showers,” Hiroyuki K. M. Tanaka, 2022 April 30, Scientific Reports