2015/07/09 by M. Kazda, Michael Kazda, Vladislav Gerginov +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Frequency and Time Standards #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Atomic clock #Caesium #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Computer science #Duty cycle #Frequency scaling #Frequency standard #Materials science #Microwave #Optics #Phase (matter) #Physics #Power (physics) #SIGNAL (programming language) #Spectrum analyzer #physics.atom-ph #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1109/tuffc.2016.2515759
published as IEEE Trans. Ultrason. Ferroelectr. Freq. Control 63, 970 (2016) · 5 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2015/07/09 · openalex publication_date 2016/01/07 · arxiv updated 2018/10/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Coherent manipulation of atomic states is a key concept in high-precision spectroscopy and used in atomic fountain clocks and a number of optical frequency standards. Operation of these standards can involve a number of cyclic switching processes, which may induce cycle-synchronous phase excursions of the interrogation signal and thus lead to shifts in the output of the frequency standard. We have built a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based phase analyzer to investigate these effects and conducted measurements on two kinds of frequency standards. For the caesium fountains PTB-CSF1 and PTB-CSF2, we were able to exclude phase variations of the microwave source at the level of a few microradians, corresponding to relative frequency shifts of less than [Formula: see text]. In the optical domain, we investigated phase variations in PTB's Yb (+) optical frequency standard and made detailed measurements of acousto-optic modulator (AOM) chirps and their scaling with duty cycle and driving power. We ascertained that cycle-synchronous as well as long-term phase excursion do not cause frequency shifts larger than [Formula: see text].