Artwork by Akshita Arora
From conversation on:
May 20, 2023
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From the biggest waves of the ocean to the tiniest of the atoms tick at their own frequencies. While some are extremely periodic, others shift through time. The watch on your wrist or the clock on your wall might tell you the time of the day but what do we turn to when we need to record time with extreme precision and accuracy such as in picoseconds? We turn to the atoms! Yes, atomic clocks are used throughout scientific instruments on Earth and outer space, and form the basis of the Global Positioning system among other innumerable resources that take power from the precision measurements and timekeeping standards, running essentially at the backbone of our everyday worlds. Reeling into the world of atomic clocks and trying to understand their fundamentals as well as the technology, we converse with the man behind India’s first ever indigenous space-based clock, Prof. Thejesh Bandi, currently an associate professor at the University of Alabama, US and the former Division Head of the Atomic Clocks Division at SAC, ISRO. P.S.: This conversation was recorded before the launch of the first Indigenous atomic clock, which has since been demonstrated to be working successfully in space!
In CERN, at LHC, when we accelerate and bombard two protons at 99.99% the speed of light, one may ask by doing so how is it going to help humanity? Because it's not a simple experiment and it costs billions of dollars. But in effect, 'internet' today is an offshoot of that complicated experiment at CERN. In essence, there are a lot of branches in a tree. If your tree is pretty big, if your vision is pretty big, there are N number of branches that will come out which will have innumerable applications that we do not know as of today.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Prof. Thejesh N. Bandi Associate Professor, University of Alabama, USA
Dr. Thejesh N. Bandi is the Principal Investigator of the Precision Navigation, Time and Frequency (PNTF) group at the University of Alabama. His research interests span from basic atomic and ion spectroscopy to its novel implementation methods with the atomic clocks, and the related metrological studies. He is involved in the space clocks R&D for the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), time scales, precision frequency and time synchronization schemes and related applications. Dr. Bandi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at JPL-NASA/Caltech, Pasadena, CA, where he worked on compact mercury ion clock. He was the head of the atomic clock division at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), where he conceptualized, designed, and lead the successful research and development of the advanced indigenous space clock for the Indian navigation program.