Report on anomalous periodic jitter and Johnson noise

Looking for an undiscovered noise term whose magnitude is hypothesized to be a function of solar and celestial orientation, an experiment to measure the magnitude of jitter was conducted. Once it showed 10-sigma evidence of an anomalous periodic noise term in the time coordinate, a Johnson noise experiment was conducted to determine whether the effect also impacted voltage power via a displaced charged particle in the space coordinate. The jitter experiment measured every 8th zero crossing of a 10 MHz Rb standard, and the magnitude of each jitter sample was averaged every hour. The Fourier transform (FT) was taken, and a significant bump at 1 cycle per sidereal day in the power spectrum was observed at 10 deviations above the mean. The Johnson noise experiment measured the voltage across resistors and arrays of diodes using the industry-standard cross-correlation technique across two channels sampled at 50 MHz each and integrated every 1 or 10 seconds. The FT of the cross correlation was taken and an 80 + sigma bump at 1 cycle per solar day and an additional 20 + sigma bump at 2 cycles per solar day was seen in the cleanest run. While the original experiment was in UT, it was cloned and repeated in Hawaii and Montana, each with similar results. While all the resistors and diodes were isolated in thermal chambers, the ambient temperature of the ADC did have variation once per day. However, efforts were undertaken to determine the thermal coefficient of the entire measurement apparatus to show the noise bumps at 1 and 2 cycles per solar day were 100x too big and the wrong phase to be explained by variations in the ambient temperature. These efforts suggest we can rule out natural ambient temperature fluctuation causation, and we qualify these bumps in the FT of jitter and Johnson noise as anomalous. We suggest a possible explanation as to why this anomaly was not found in the precise measurements of clock noise nor the determination of Boltzmann’s constant via Johnson noise conducted by NIST in 2017. As this anomaly has not been published before, we recognize we don’t have all the answers and anticipate this is just the beginning of the exploration with many additional factors and findings to be investigated and reported. Lastly, to keep this article fact-based, we currently refrain from sharing the original hypothesis or offering conclusions.