Stability Improvements of the Miniature Atomic Clock Through Enhanced Thermal Method

Advancement of compact atomic clocks has centered on reducing footprint and power consumption. Such developments come at the cost of the clock’s stability performance. Various commercial and military applications demand reduced size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements but desire an enhanced stability performance to what is achieved with the lower-profile standards, such as Microchip’s Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) or Miniature Atomic Clock (MAC). Furthermore, a high-performing space-rated clock will enhance small satellite missions by providing capability for alternate PNT, one-way radiometric ranging, and eventual lunar PNT purposes. The MAC is a strong candidate as it has modest SWaP parameters. Enhanced performance improvement to the MAC, particularly in the medium to long-term stability over a day and beyond will strengthen its candidacy as an on-board reference clock in small satellite missions and other ground-based applications. In this work, using thermal methods we demonstrate an improvement of the MAC performance by at least a factor of five, showing a superior stability of σy = 4.2e-13 compared to the best-performing miniaturized standard on the market for averaging intervals of τ>1e4 s up to 4 days.