A container ship ran aground in the Red Sea in May 2025 after GPS interference placed it hundreds of miles away in the Sahara. A phonon laser paper in Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-70564-3) narrows the path to a GPS-independent quantum compass.
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A 300-meter container ship ran aground in May 2025 after GPS spoofing placed it hundreds of miles inland in the Sahara. Researchers at the University of Rochester and RIT have demonstrated a phonon laser using an optically levitated nanoparticle that achieves subthermal two-mode squeezing, reducing quantum noise below thermal limits to enable ultra-precise acceleration measurements. This capability could form the basis of GPS-independent inertial navigation systems that outperform current methods, which accumulate ~20km position error over 100 hours of satellite-signal loss.
In May 2025, a 300-meter container ship ran aground in the Red Sea. Its GPS receiver was showing a position hundreds of miles away in the Sahara Desert. The ship wasn't lost — GPS signals had been jammed or spoofed, and the navigation system had no idea where it actually was. That's a problem with no good fix, at least not yet. A team at the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology has published a paper in Nature Communications that they say points toward one: a phonon laser that can measure acceleration more precisely than anything based on light or radio waves, and that precision is exactly what a GPS-independent navigation system needs to stay accurate when satellite signals disappear. Nature Communications
Phonons are the quantized units of vibrational motion — sound at the scale of individual atoms. An optical laser controls photons; a phonon laser does the same for vibrations in a tiny particle. The Rochester/RIT device uses a single nanoparticle levitated by laser light in a vacuum chamber. The particle has two center-of-mass oscillation modes, and the team applies a combination of nonlinear damping and parametric modulation at the sum of those mechanical frequencies. The result, according to the paper, is sustained oscillation above the stability threshold with subthermal two-mode squeezing — meaning the quantum noise in the system drops below what thermal vibrations alone would allow. University of Rochester
That noise reduction is the point. "By pushing and pulling on a phonon laser with light in the right way, we can reduce that phonon laser fluctuation significantly," said Nick Vamivakas, the Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Optical Physics at the University of Rochester Institute of Optics and a coauthor of the paper. "We believe this approach can measure acceleration more accurately than methods based on traditional light lasers or radio frequency technologies." ScienceDaily
The authors are careful about what "more accurately" means here. This is a lab result, not a product. The paper demonstrates the effect in a controlled environment with an optically levitated nanoparticle. Building a ruggedized version that could survive deployment on a ship, a submarine, or a missile is a different engineering problem and not a small one. The nanoparticle is held in place by a focused laser beam. Ships roll. Submarines dive. Missiles accelerate. None of that is compatible with delicate bench-top optics.
But the underlying capability gap is real. Existing specialized inertial navigation devices — the kind that don't rely on GPS — accumulate position errors of roughly 20 kilometers after 100 hours of travel, MIT Technology Review and the cheap sensors in smartphones produce more than twice that level of uncertainty after a single hour. MIT Technology Review The fundamental limit is noise: thermal vibrations, readout noise, environmental interference. Squeezing — deliberately reducing quantum fluctuations in one property at the expense of another — is how quantum sensors push past that limit.
The paper is titled "A two-mode thermomechanically squeezed phonon laser" and carries DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-70564-3. The lead author is K. Zhang, a PhD student at the University of Rochester. Co-authors include K. Xiao, a postdoctoral researcher at RIT; M. Bhattacharya, an associate professor of physics at RIT; and A.N. Vamivakas. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation. EurekAlert
The downstream device people call a "quantum compass" would use precision acceleration measurements to calculate position without any external signals. No GPS. No GLONASS. No satellite reference of any kind. A navigation system that can't be spoofed by throwing enough noise at it, because it doesn't listen for satellites in the first place. Researchers have been working toward it for years. The question has always been whether the sensor precision was achievable outside a laboratory. This paper doesn't answer that question — it narrows the gap.
Whether it closes depends on engineering that hasn't been done yet.
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Research completed — 0 sources registered. The core paper: Nature Communications doi:10.1038/s41467-026-70564-3, published March 30, 2026. Authors: K. Zhang, K. Xiao, M. Bhattacharya, A.N. Vami
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