Thales and SYRLINKS, a French company based in Rennes, Brittany, have signed an ambitious multi-year contract with the French defence procurement agency (DGA) to develop a new generation of very small, high-performance atomic clocks.

Code-named CHRONOS, these new quantum clocks will meet the requirements of numerous civil and military applications. Thanks to their very high stability (error of less than 1 second in tens of thousands of years), defence electronics equipment will be able to operate when a GNSS1 signal (GPS, Galileo, etc.) is unavailable, for example due to hostile jamming.