[time-nuts] Cesium vs H Maser clocks
Tom Van Baak
tvb at LeapSecond.com
Sat Nov 29 18:03:36 UTC 2008
>> In order for cesium beam standards to even work, one must apply
>> a slight magnetic field, the so-called C-field, which rather strongly
>> distorts the shape of the resonance peak.
>
> Tom (and all),
>
> do you think that a Cs clock, having a not-well-adjusted
> C field, might have a shape of the resonant peak distorted
> such that the clock might show metastability?
>
> Antonio I8IOV
Hi Antonio,
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "strongly". Here are
real numbers instead -- a typical Cs beam tube has a 53 kHz
splitting (compare with the 9 192 631 kHz center peak) when
the C-field is 76 milligauss.
Here's an old time nuts thread about Zeeman frequencies:
http://www.mail-archive.com/time-nuts@febo.com/msg00233.html
If you want to see the peaks for yourself, see this experiment:
http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/cspeak/
And my favorite, a large color plot of peak splitting vs. C-field:
http://www.leapsecond.com/images/cfield.gif
/tvb
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