An Ion Clock Reaches the Accuracy of the Best Atomic Fountain
FEB 01, 1998
By cooling mercury ions and confining the ions to the one line in their linear ion trap where the RF field is exactly zero, researchers have minimized the jiggling and heating that have confounded many attempts to achieve precise determinations of frequency.
DOI: 10.1063/1.882137
The most accurate primary frequency standards in the world today reside in the national standards laboratories of several countries: They are an atomic‐fountain clock at the Paris Observatory’s Bureau National de Métrologie—Laboratoire Primaire de Temps et Fréquences and two atomic‐beam clocks, one run by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and another by the German Federal Institute of Physics and Metrology in Braunschweig.
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© 1998 American Institute of Physics
