Preliminary results from the USNO cesium fountain atomic clock

摘要

We discuss a cesium fountain atomic clock that we have built at the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO). At the time of this writing, all of the subsystems for the device have been built and final assembly is complete. We expect to present initial data from the device soon. We also discuss different strategies for reporting frequency offsets of the fountain from UTC(USNO) and for steering its local oscillator (crystal oscillator or hydrogen maser). Concurrent with this work we are building a rubidium fountain, that may have even better systematics than the cesium fountain.