Overview
- Peer-reviewed results appeared on November 14 in Physical Review Letters, led by Oxford’s Natalia Ares with collaborators from TU Wien and Trinity College Dublin.
- The team built a microscopic clock from a double quantum dot in which single-electron hops function as ticks.
- Researchers read the ticks by detecting ultra-small electric currents or radio-frequency shifts that convert quantum events into recordable information.
- Entropy accounting showed the measurement step can dissipate up to a billion times more energy than the clock mechanism and introduces irreversibility tied to time’s one-way flow.
- The authors argue future advances should prioritize energy-efficient readout, noting that higher measurement energy can also deliver substantially improved precision.