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The main variety of atomic clock uses caesium atoms cooled to temperatures that approach absolute zero. The primary standard for the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s caesium fountain clock named NIST-F2, measures time with an uncertainty of 1 second in 300 million years (relative uncertainty 10 −16 ...
The first caesium clock was built by Louis Essen in 1955 at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK [1] and promoted worldwide by Gernot M. R. Winkler of the United States Naval Observatory. Caesium atomic clocks are one of the most accurate time and frequency standards, and serve as the primary standard for the definition of the second in ...
Like other caesium atomic clocks, the clock keeps time by a precise 9.192631770 GHz microwave signal emitted by electron spin transitions between two hyperfine energy levels in atoms of caesium-133. A feedback mechanism keeps a quartz crystal oscillator on the chip locked to this frequency, which is divided down by digital counters to give 10 ...
NIST-F1 is a cesium fountain clock, a type of atomic clock, in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and serves as the United States' primary time and frequency standard. The clock took fewer than four years to test and build, and was developed by Steve Jefferts and Dawn Meekhof of the Time and ...
Caesium (IUPAC spelling; [9] also spelled cesium in American English) is a chemical element; it has symbol Cs and atomic number 55. It is a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28.5 °C (83.3 °F; 301.6 K), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near room temperature.
The exact modern SI definition is "[The second] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the cesium frequency, Δν Cs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s −1." [1]
The rack-mounted units in the background are HP 5071A caesium beam clocks. The black units in the foreground are Sigma-Tau MHM-2010 hydrogen maser standards. A master clock is a precision clock that provides timing signals to synchronise slave clocks as part of a clock network. Networks of electric clocks connected by wires to a precision ...
The caesium atomic clock maintained by NIST is accurate to 30 billionths of a second per year. [206] Atomic clocks have employed other elements, such as hydrogen and rubidium vapor, offering greater stability (in the case of hydrogen clocks) and smaller size, lower power consumption, and thus lower cost (in the case of rubidium clocks). [206]