How to pronounce fibre optic cable in English?

Accurate clocks are important for more than just getting to work on time, or presenting months of work in three minutes. Accurate time keeping is needed for financial transactions, telecommunications, distributed computing, GPS navigation, and a huge range of scientific experiments. Many of these applications require the signal from an atomic clock to be transmitted thousands of kilometres. Today, these signals are transmitted by satellite, but this method is now inadequate. We need better ways of sending such ultra-precise time signals over vast distances. And this is where my work comes in — I’m investigating ways to stabilize time and frequency transmission. The expansion of optical fibre networks has made it possible to transmit clock signals with a thousand-fold increase in precision. But this creates new problems — vibrations from machinery or minor earthquakes, and heating and cooling during the day stretch the fibre optic cable enough to degrade the precision of the transmitted signal. So I want to stabilize the signals and maintain the best precision possible. One way to stabilize the signals — the way I’m concentrating on — is to return part of the transmitted signal from the receiver back to the sender. You all know about Doppler shift —the difference you hear between an approaching ambulance and one that’s going away. The stretching and shrinking of a fibre optic cable Doppler shifts the returning signal, and if I compare the shifted signal to the desired signal, I can adjust the outgoing frequency to compensate. My research has many potential applications, but the two major science projects I’m involved with are the Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space and the Square Kilometre Array telescope, the SKA. For the last seven months I’ve been working on a system to distribute timing signals through the SKA’s fibre optic network to dozens of antennas far more cheaply than the standard approach of installing an atomic clock at each site. In November I’m off to the Australian SKA Pathfinder to test the prototype and prove its effectiveness to the SKA engineers. After that, I’ll be working on transmitting the ultra-stable signals generated by the atomic clocks here at UWA to the Western Australia Space Centre, where they will be transmitted to the International Space Station. By comparing atomic clocks on the space station with atomic clocks here on the ground, we can perform high precision tests of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and even test whether or not fundamental constants of the universe are changing over time. Spin-offs of these technologies include more accurate time stamping on financial transactions, which will make share trading faster and more profitable, and improved accuracy of GPS, with flow-on effects in navigation and earth sciences. While the SKA and the Space Station probably seem a long way away and not relevant to you, I assure you that improved signal stability in GPS, finance and communications will become part of your life in the not-too-distant future.