On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 12:34 PM, Attila Kinali <[email protected]> wrote: > I just stumbled over this [1] nice article by Fritz Riehle that might be > of interest to others as well.
I've seen less discussion of non-atomic stable optical oscillators. Most (all?) of these optical atomic standards are passive atomic clocks and need a free running oscillator. Seems that the state of the art in stabilized lasers has improved a lot lately, e.g. there are commercial available 1550nm devices which have a <=3Hz line-width: http://stablelasers.com/products.html (well on a short term basis, the medium term performance is not so impressive) Considering the rarity and extreme cost of H-masers, or just really exceptional quarts oscillators; might it be the case that optical LOs start looking interesting for applications which just need stability (or being steered by other sources; e.g. GPSDL)? (They can be down-converted to microwave frequencies using an optical comb; a mode-locked laser whos pulses are phase locked to an incoming beam.) Certainly just the local oscillator is _closer_ to something a time-nut might experiment with than a complete optical atomic standard (if still not quite in reach). _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
