Quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental tradeoff between the accuracy of time
measurements and the size of the systems used as clocks. When the measurements
of different time intervals are combined, the errors due to the finite clock
size accumulate, resulting in an overall inaccuracy that grows with the
complexity of the setup. Here we introduce a method that in principle eludes
the accumulation of errors by coherently transferring information from a
quantum clock to a quantum memory of the smallest possible size. Our method
could be used to measure the total duration of a sequence of events with
enhanced accuracy, and to reduce the amount of quantum communication needed to
stabilize clocks in a quantum network.Comment: 10 + 5 pages, 3 figure