Determining the Effects of Microwave Power and C-Field Setting on the Frequency of a Cesium Atomic Frequency Standard.

摘要

In experiments at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology, Andrea De Marchi showed that there exist optimum values of the C-field setting in a commercial dual-beam cesium frequency standard that make the output frequency insensitive to variations in microwave power. Moreover, and most important, De Marchi demonstrated that the long-term stability of the clock is improved if the C-field is set at one of these optimum settings. To see if these results can be obtained with a clock having a different modulation scheme, the authors, using a completely automated measuring system, performed a similar study on another manufacturer's commercial cesium standard; this standard employed single-beam tube optics and a modulation scheme different from that used by the clocks studied by De Marchi. Our results, similar to those of De Marchi, show that optimum C-field settings exist for the standard we investigated. Keywords: Atomic clocks; C-field tuning (Zeeman frequency); Cesium atomic clocks. (jhd)