[time-nuts] H-Maser drift (was: Why discipline Rubidium oscillator?)

[Attila Kinali]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2017 15:31:25 +0100
Ole Petter Ronningen <opronningen at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Hehe.. Yes. It's "small" compared to the cavity. Depending on the
> > exact cavity construction, the storage space can be as small as
> > a tenth of the total cavity volume.
> 
> Thats interesting, I would think a small volume would result in increased
> spin exchange - do you have any papers detailing the tradeoffs with
> big/small storage bulbs?

I would have to go through my collection to find those that mention
anything on it.

The tradeoff is bascially, that you want to have an as large volume
as possible to minimize wall and atom-atom collisions. But there is
only a certain volume within the cavity, where the field has the
right orientation. The higher the mode of the cavity, the smaller
the volume (relative to the cavity size). Higher cavity modes are
used to shrink the overall cavity size, without the need of loading,
which introduces losses. 

				Attila Kinali

-- 
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