[time-nuts] You can build a fountain from the things you find at home...

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Tue Sep 27 20:39:37 UTC 2011


On 27/09/11 22:23, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message<CAD2JfAgqBOEG-iyb5z2_RbJuLdj7SbVC5bofPnTK45RjeSrBvQ at mail.gmail.com>
> , paul swed writes:
>
>> Boy I have to go back and check. I thought fountains used lasers and such to
>> slow the atoms down.
>
> They do.  And a microwave field.
>
> But I still think it is easier to make work than the state selection magnets
> in a CS.
>
> Of course, there's also the laser-based cesium to consider.
>

I agree fully. The state selection magnets (Stern-Gerlach experiment) 
needs to provide a strong gradient field which may be hard to build for 
the amateur. Building working RF section, vacuum assembly, oven I rate 
as simpler. Still lot of work to do.

Laser based state-selection and state-detection would indeed be 
possible, and move the challenges to the optical bench.

One possible aspect to the laser based state-selection and 
state-detection is that the target could be another oven, such that 
alternating direction cycling can be used. This addresses the 
phase-shift issue between the arms in the RF assembly, assuming 
sufficient stability otherwise. The same issue would not be as dominant 
in the fountain.

Cheers,
Magnus



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