AtomTRAIN: Atom-based Transportation Resilience with Atom Interferometer Navigation

Quantum sensing technologies offer levels of measurement precision, accuracy and stability that exceed those offered by classical (or non-quantum) approaches. An area where this performance enhancement shows great potential is in positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems. An important subcategory of PNT systems are ones based on inertial navigation systems. These calculate a relative position from a known starting point based on continuous measurements of acceleration, rotation and time. Such systems are essential in environments where satellite navigation systems are either unavailable, such as when underground or underwater, or when they are actively denied. Currently, the long-term positioning accuracy of such systems is severely limited by the performance of the classical acceleration and rotation sensors that they use, even in state-of-the-art incarnations. The performance of rotation and acceleration sensors based on atom interferometry with ultra-cold atoms offer at least an order of magnitude improvement on the long-term positioning accuracy of such classical inertial navigation systems. Despite this potential, there are currently no commercially available inertial measurement units that deliver the benefits of cold atom acceleration and rotation sensing. Our project will change this through the delivery of a commercially viable demonstrator system that offers quantum-enhanced positioning capability in the navigation of trains.

Deploying quantum-IMUs on trains is intended to increase both positioning accuracy and precision, and also offering an extra layer of resilience and redundancy to current state-of-the-art systems. This could have several benefits, including the reduction in delays and cancellations, increasing the density of train traffic on a given section of track, and also reduced costs of maintaining and upgrading current signalling systems.