phoenix-anna said:
Putting aside the question of whether it is politically feasible, why would we do it if we could?
Sorry about the rambling. Here are some I can think of:
1. If the network consisted of entangled clocks on satellites, it would be an
excellent platform for gravitational wave (GW) detection, competitive with LISA and eLISA. See this 2016 paper (
arXiv 1606.01859 /
Phys Rev D 94, 124043) for a full reference. If nothing else, it would provide independent confirmation of GWs as seen by a fundamentally different apparatus (clocks instead of an interferometer). If I understand the 2013 paper you linked correctly, it would offer a ##\sqrt{2}## reduction in the noise floor, for a two-clock network.
2. Having multiple satellite clocks entangled would (I think?) make it much easier to detect a dark matter domain wall. See this
Nat. Comm. article (arXiv:
170.06844) from 2017 for a proposal using GPS satellites (without entanglement). My gut feeling is that if one of your satellite clocks moved through a domain wall, the other clocks entangled with it would go nuts (more so than if they were only classically coherent by a common local oscillator phase).
3. The entangled network would grant you a higher sensitivity (by a factor of ##\sqrt{K}##, where ##K## is the number of clocks in the network) on a gravitational redshift experiment like GREAT with a network of satellite-based clocks. This would in principle grant a higher sensitivity to redshifts effects beyond GR.
This list only applies to a quantum network of clocks
in space. I can't think of any novel uses for quantum network of ground-based clocks, at least nothing as high-impact as the above list.
The advantage of ground-based clocks is that they tend to be more advanced than what you can put into space, because you have fewer design constraints. So, a ground based network might be a much better time-keeping network, but there isn't a high demand for this. When/if the SI redefines the second based on an optical transition, that definition will be strictly a local (not global) definition of the second. That's the difference between the SI second and UTC. In contrast, there just isn't a lot of demand for a better global time standard than UTC, commercially or academically, at least not to the best of my knowledge.