Wigner Time: from experimental intent to real-time laboratory control
Abstract
Precisely timed, multi-device control in atomic, molecular and optical physics is provided by specialized real-time systems, which impose their own terms on the description of the experiment: a program over a global clock, in which every stage boundary is an absolute time computed from everything preceding it. Such descriptions are tightly coupled -- changing one stage affects all later ones -- and are correspondingly hard to reuse, inspect, or move elsewhere. We introduce Wigner Time, a Python package in which the experimental procedure is instead represented as data: a table of timed updates, assembled by composing functions and referred to named points in the experiment rather than to absolute instants. Hardware enters only at a final conversion step, leaving the description readable and back-end agnostic. Wigner Time has run two cold-atom setups for more than two years, where taking the computation out of the real-time program improved the achievable temporal resolution five-fold; the design applies to any domain requiring precise multi-device timing.
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BibTeX
@misc{clark2026wigner,
title = {{Wigner Time: from experimental intent to real-time laboratory control}},
author = {T. W. Clark and B. Sárközi and A. Dombi and Á. Kurkó and D. Nagy and A. Simon and D. Varga and P. Domokos and A. Vukics},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.06230},
eprint = {2609.06230},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06230},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Wigner Time: from experimental intent to real-time laboratory control
AU - T. W. Clark
AU - B. Sárközi
AU - A. Dombi
AU - Á. Kurkó
AU - D. Nagy
AU - A. Simon
AU - D. Varga
AU - P. Domokos
AU - A. Vukics
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.06230
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06230
AB - Precisely timed, multi-device control in atomic, molecular and optical physics is provided by specialized real-time systems, which impose their own terms on the description of the experiment: a program over a global clock, in which every stage boundary is an absolute time computed from everything preceding it. Such descriptions are tightly coupled -- changing one stage affects all later ones -- and are correspondingly hard to reuse, inspect, or move elsewhere. We introduce Wigner Time, a Python package in which the experimental procedure is instead represented as data: a table of timed updates, assembled by composing functions and referred to named points in the experiment rather than to absolute instants. Hardware enters only at a final conversion step, leaving the description readable and back-end agnostic. Wigner Time has run two cold-atom setups for more than two years, where taking the computation out of the real-time program improved the achievable temporal resolution five-fold; the design applies to any domain requiring precise multi-device timing.
ER -