[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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