Publications related to Quartz clock

Room-temperature quantum optomechanics using an ultralow noise cavity

Tobias Kippenberg, Alberto Beccari, Nils Johan Engelsen, Guanhao Huang

At room temperature, mechanical motion driven by the quantum backaction of light has been observed only in pioneering experiments in which an optical restoring force controls the oscillator stiffness1,2. For solid-state mechanical resonators in which oscil ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Aging Fly Cell Atlas identifies exhaustive aging features at cellular resolution

Maria Brbic, Sandy Lee

Aging is characterized by a decline in tissue function, but the underlying changes at cellular resolution across the organism remain unclear. Here, we present the Aging Fly Cell Atlas, a single-nucleus transcriptomic map of the whole aging Drosophila. We c ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2023

Triple Crossed Flexure Pivot Based on a Zero Parasitic Center Shift Kinematic Design

Simon Nessim Henein, Etienne Frédéric Gabriel Thalmann

Thanks to their absence of play, absence of contact friction and possible monolithic fabrication, flexure pivots offer advantages over traditional bearings in small-scale, high accuracy applications and environments where lubrication and wear debris are pr ...

2022

Optical measurement method for mechanical time base characterization

Simon Nessim Henein, Etienne Frédéric Gabriel Thalmann

The recent adoption of silicon components by the mechanical watch industry has triggered the search for new time bases to advantageously replace the traditional balance and hairspring oscillator. In particular, flexure-based oscillators manufactured in sil ...

euspen2021

Control-Free Mechanical Oscillator Powered by Shape Memory Alloys

Yves Perriard, Paolo Germano, Thomas Guillaume Martinez, Sean Thomas

Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) based actuators have been commonly used in applications that require being compact and lightweight. In this paper, the inherent stiffness of a flexure-based linear guide is used to create a bias-spring SMA actuator which further re ...

IEEE2021

Shaking force balancing of a 2-DOF isotropic horological oscillator

Simon Nessim Henein, Hubert Pierre-Marie Benoît Schneegans, Etienne Frédéric Gabriel Thalmann

Despite centuries of research and significant advances, the escapement mechanism used to count and maintain oscillations of mechanical time bases remains a complex mechanism and a major source of energy losses. We showed in previous work that, instead of t ...

2021

Low Noise Clock Generation: Modeling, Analysis and Implementation

Duygu Kostak

The aim of this thesis is to implement, analyze and improve the selected low noise clock generation and distribution techniques for ADC implementations. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the sampling phase generation and distr ...

EPFL2021

Flexure Pivot Oscillators for Mechanical Watches

Etienne Frédéric Gabriel Thalmann

It appears that the concerted efforts of the watchmaking industry are leading towards a limit in mechanical watch accuracy. The general consensus in horology is that the time base's quality factor, a dimensionless number that characterizes the oscillator d ...

EPFL2020

Scanning near-field optical microscopy with new probes and feedback modes

Anton Smirnov

Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy (SNOM) technique enables to overcome Abbe diffraction limit of far-field optics as well as to obtain simultaneously optical and topographical images. While the optical resolution of the method is limited by the apertu ...

EPFL2019

Long-life plastic optical fiber probes for scanning near-field optical microscope

Giovanni Dietler, Serguei Sekatski, Anton Smirnov, Ekaterina Rostova

Nowadays, sharpened glass fiber - made probes attached to a quartz tuning fork (TF) and exploiting the shear force - based feedback are by far the most popular in the field of SNOM. These probes are expensive, very fragile and their fabrication is difficul ...

SPIE-INT SOC OPTICAL ENGINEERING2018

MEMS Generator Study for an Embedded Energy Harvesting System

Jasha Poliakine

This work has been triggered by an industrial project targeting the development of a novel regulation system for a mechanical watch. Mechanical watches have been known for over a century as one of the finest example of energy autonomous devices, embodying ...

EPFL2018

Programmable Multistable Mechanisms: Design, modeling, characterization and applications

Mohamed Gamal Abdelrahman Ahmed Zanaty

Multistable Mechanisms are mechanical devices having more than one stable state. Since these mechanisms can maintain different deformations with zero force, they are advantageous for low power environments such as wristwatches and medical devices. In this ...

EPFL2018

Gravity-Insensitive Flexure Pivot Oscillators

Simon Nessim Henein, Ilan Vardi, Etienne Frédéric Gabriel Thalmann, Lennart Rubbert, Mohammad Hussein Kahrobaiyan

Classical mechanical watch plain bearing pivots have frictional losses limiting the quality factor of the hairspring-balance wheel oscillator. Replacement by flexure pivots leads to a drastic reduction in friction and an order of magnitude increase in qual ...

2018

3D printed microwave cavity for atomic clock applications: proof of concept

Anja Skrivervik, Emile Jacques de Rijk

The authors present the realisation and characterisation of an additively manufactured (AM) microwave resonator cavity for double-resonance (DR) vapour-cell atomic clocks. The design of the compact microwave cavity is based on the loop-gap resonator approa ...

2018

A 32kHz crystal oscillator leveraging voltage scaling in an ultra-low power 40nA real-time clock

Maher Kayal, Luca Rossi, François Krummenacher, Mathieu Yves Hervé Coustans

In this paper, an ultra-low power consumption crystal oscillator embedded in an RTC module (ASIC and its crystal resonator) is presented. The technique leverages oscillation amplitude and loads capacitance scaling; it incorporates transistor level merging ...

IEEE2018

Recent improvements on micro-thermocouple based SThM

Danick Briand

The scanning thermal microscope (SThM) has become a versatile tool for local surface temperature mapping or measuring thermal properties of solid materials. In this article, we present recent improvements in a SThM system, based on a micro-wire thermocoupl ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2017

Dynamic Facility Location via Exponential Clocks

Ola Nils Anders Svensson, Ashkan Norouzi Fard, Hyung Chan An

The dynamic facility location problem is a generalization of the classic facility location problem proposed by Eisenstat, Mathieu, and Schabanel to model the dynamics of evolving social/infrastructure networks. The generalization lies in that the distance ...

Association for Computing Machinery2017

Ultrasonic driving method

Jacques Jacot

A method for driving a first component (11) into a second component (12) by superimposing a mechanical wave of ultrasonic frequency (18) onto the movement (17) of at least one of the components (11, 12). The method comprises a step of adjusting the paramet ...

2016

A 400 fJ Per-Cycle Frequency Reference for Internet of Things

Maher Kayal, François Krummenacher, Mathieu Yves Hervé Coustans

This work presents an ultra-low power oscillator designed to target different contexts, such as crystal-assisted time keeping, reference oscillator to optimize the always on domain of a microcontroller or wake-up timer. This oscillator enables ultra-low po ...

2016

A nA Crystal - Less Oscillator for Internet of Things

Maher Kayal, François Krummenacher, Mathieu Yves Hervé Coustans

This work presents an ultra-low power oscillator designed to target different contexts, such as crystal-assisted time keeping, reference oscillator to optimize the always on domain of a microcontroller or wake-up timer. This oscillator enables ultra-low po ...

Ieee2016