Coherent Optical-Fiber Link Across Italy and France

The dissemination of atomic clocks with fiber-based techniques finds application in the fields of metrology, fundamental physics, navigation, and spectroscopy but is a challenge in terms of reliability, maintenance, and performance. Here, we describe the realization of a 1023-km-long fiber link between the metrological institutes of Italy and France that shares the infrastructure with the Internet traffic and exploits segmentation in shorter, cascaded spans to fight optical losses exceeding 280 dB. With four months of quasicontinuous operation of this link, we compared the Cs, Rb, and Yb atomic clocks at our laboratories, highlighting the potential of this tool to assess the clock uncertainty budgets, characterize advanced satellite techniques, and develop optical timescales. The integration of the metrological, fiber-based infrastructures in the two countries, connecting photonics and spectroscopy laboratories as well as telescope facilities, provides the research community with a physical layer over which applications can be built on.