Laura Sinclair Receives 2024 Arthur S. Flemming Award

Dr. Laura Sinclair is being recognized in the Applied Science and Engineering category for pioneering femtosecond free-space optical time-transfer, enabling unprecedented precision in timekeeping. 

During her 12 years at NIST, she has authored nearly all foundational research in this field, and currently leads teams that continuously shatter the limitations of the then-state-of-the-art technology. 

Sinclair's innovations demonstrated a thousand-fold improvement over GPS-based time transfer and established the groundwork for vital ground-to-satellite links. Her work is critical for adopting optical clock-based timekeeping, the future redefinition of the second, and advancing applications such as distributed black hole imaging, quantum networks, advanced navigation, and chronometric geodesy. Traditional time-transfer methods are constrained by picosecond-level performance, insufficient to support state-of-the-art optical clocks. 

Sinclair's unique integration of fast digital signal processing and Nobel Prize-winning laser frequency comb technology has enabled her team to achieve attosecond control of light fields, breaking the picosecond barrier while operating at ultra-low power. These breakthroughs will facilitate global femtosecond-level timing networks with accuracies on the order of one second in 32 million years and numerous exciting measurement capabilities based on those networks.