A ship equipped with the technology could navigate more accurately than with chart and compass and without satellite-based navigation on which the world now relies
The Royal Navy has carried out the first trial of a quantum navigation system that could allow a vessel to know its precise position anywhere in the world without using GPS.
"Sometimes that can be interfered with or sometimes it doesn't work," said Captain Tom Ryan, head of Navy X, the Royal Navy's research division. "This is a very exotic environment for one of these kinds of sensors," said Dr Joe Cotter, from Imperial College, who helped develop it. The contents of the white box are secret, so to get an idea of how it works we visit its prototype in Imperial College's Blackett Laboratory .The quantum accelerometer - to give it its proper name - comprises a squashed steel sphere with various ducts and wires coming out of it.
"By encoding these acceleration and rotation signals in the internal states of atoms, it will protect them from the real world," said Dr Cotter.
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