A Chinese team has realized, for the first time in the world, the ultra-high-precision time-frequency dissemination, a technique to monitor and synchronize clocks, over a long distance, more than 100 kilometers.

The scientific achievement could help set higher standards for the global timing, navigation and positioning, the wide-area quantum communication and the testing of physics basic principles.

The research group led by Pan Jianwei from University of Science and Technology of China described in a study published in the Nature this week the time-frequency dissemination with an instability of less than 4E-19 at 10,000 seconds through a free-space link of 113 kilometers in Urumqi.