Symposium Organizers
Francesco Dell’Olio, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
Andrey B. Matsko, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA
Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) relied exclusively upon the Global Navigation Satellite System is inherently fragile. Innovative navigation micro-technologies are urgently needed for a broad range of aerospace & defence applications. Micro-photonics has a potential to become the platform of choice enabling disruptive technologies featuring reduced size, weight, and power consumption in timing systems as well as angular velocity/acceleration sensors the PNT is based on. Although ground-breaking achievements have recently been reported in the field, such as the first experimental demonstration of Earth rate measurement by a chip-scale photonic gyro and the development of a photonic integration approach for next-generation optical atomic clocks, a number of challenges still exists, including on-chip integration of the devices without their performance degradation. New concepts have to be envisaged and theoretically/experimentally investigated.
The special symposium aims at discussing the latest achievements in the micro-photonic PNT, highlighting the open research challenges and the most promising paths of improvement.