Phase noise of the frequency synthesizer is one of the main limitations to the short-term stability of microwave atomic clocks. Here, a lownoise, simple-architecture microwave frequency synthesizer for a coherent population trapping (CPT) clock is demonstrated. The synthesizer is mainly composed of a 100 MHz oven-controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO), a microwave comb generator, and a direct digital synthesizer (DDS). The absolute phase noises of 3.417 GHz signal are measured to be −55 dBc/Hz, −81 dBc/Hz, −111 dBc/Hz and −134 dBc/Hz, respectively, for 1 Hz, 10 Hz, 100 Hz and 1 kHz offset frequencies, which shows only 1 dB deterioration at the second harmonic of the modulation frequency of the atomic clock. The estimated frequency stability of intermodulation effect is 4.7 × 10 −14 at 1 s averaging time, which is about half order of magnitude lower than that of the state-of-the-art CPT Rb clock. Our work offers an alternative microwave synthesizer for high-performance CPT Rb atomic clock.
In this paper, a microwave phase compensation scheme is adopted. It utilizes microwave signals of different frequencies for round-trip signal transmission over a 250 km fiber optic link to mitigate the impact of parasitic reflections. Additionally, dispersion compensation fibers are employed to compensate for the dispersion in the fiber optic link. Bidirectional optical amplifiers are utilized to compensate for the losses in long-distance fiber optic links and reduce optical path asymmetry. By implementing these methods, the transmission stability of the fiber optic microwave frequency transmission system achieves 5.6 × 10−15 at 1 s and 2.8 × 10−18 at 100,000 s.
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