-------- In message <[email protected]>, Magnus D anielson writes:
>> They won't be coherent photons, like in a Hydrogen maser, but we >> don't need them to be, in fact that just causes the same exact >> problems as the tuned cavity anyway, as long as we can measure >> the frequency well enough. > >Active maser like the hydrogen would be possible naturally, but would >require the resonator. I don't think they are. With hydrogen, hitting the excited electron with the right frequency increases the probability of coherent emission of the photon enough that you get to the "SE" we know from LASER and MASER. As I understand it not all excited modes of all atoms and molecules have the not-quite-pinned-down quantum-thaumagic property to do that. And I remember reading somewhere that the alkali atoms have been poked and prodded to no end about this, in the hope of creating active Cs, Rb or Sr frequency standards, but the very reluctant (and expensive) conclusion was that hydrogen is the only one in the family which knows the trick. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ 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.
