4 ms·

I have a friend whose bucket list included owning an Atomic Clock. We ended up repairing several HP 5061Bs along the way. We did the X/Y axis oscilloscope compa

• tverbeure 3y ago
  Do my Rubidium references (yes, plural) count? They're not quite as stable as a Cesium-based 5061, but I believe they use the same principle so they’re technically also atomic clocks.
  • mikewarot 3y ago
    Yes they count, but they use a completely different principle of operation. The Cesium beam clock actually has a stream of atoms flowing through it, which is finite, leading to tube lifetimes of a decade or less. The rubidium clock has a number of cells of rubidium gas, one of which is a light source, the other of which gets hit with RF, and if the frequency is just right, it absorbes about 1% of the light before it hits the detector. A much smaller physics package, to be sure. They do drift, though, a tiny bit.