Rotating neutron stars for checking and calibrating atomic clocks. Free Technical Library News

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Rotating neutron stars to test and calibrate atomic clocks

06.01.2019

We have repeatedly talked about atomic clocks, which provide high-precision time reading, on the pages of our website. And, of course, many of our readers have repeatedly wondered how the values of the characteristics of these watches were obtained, because in order to measure something with a certain accuracy, a measuring tool with at least an order of magnitude higher accuracy is required. We do not know how other organizations that have atomic clocks at their disposal, but the European Space Agency uses the signals of distant rotating neutron stars and pulsars to synchronize their clocks, the signals emitted by which have sufficiently high stability and accuracy.

This project, called "PulChron", is the development of scientists from the University of Manchester, the British National Physical Laboratory and private company GMV. The system created during this project is already partly used to synchronize the atomic clocks that power the European Galileo satellite navigation system. Moreover, long-term measurements of pulsar signals, combined with measurements of vibrations of vibrating atoms in clocks, make it possible to obtain even more accurate timing than either of the components of the system separately allows.

Physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell first discovered a pulsar in 1967 when she noticed a radio signal coming from deep space with a period of 1,34 seconds. Note that this signal was received by the antennas of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array telescope of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. At present, it is already known that pulsars are neutron stars, small and very dense remnants of the explosions of massive stars, which rotate at times at great speed and emit a directed beam of radiation that is periodically directed towards the Earth.

Now pulsars, or rather their signals, are used not only to synchronize atomic clocks. They are also tools to search for and measure gravitational waves, dark matter, and other phenomena on a cosmological scale.

The PulChron equipment receives data from five radio telescopes, including the European Pulsar Timing Array, which track 18 pulsars simultaneously. Atomic clocks also generate their own frequency, one period of which is one "tick" of the clock. But relatively simple atomic clocks based on hydrogen atoms excited by a microwave laser can drift (change their frequency) over long periods of time. And in this case, another system with higher stability is required to carry out the correction, for example, the Galileo system clock requires a synchronization and correction procedure every few hours.

The PulChron system is not the first "pulsar" chronometric system; moreover, it still exists in its first, one might say, demo version. But once this system is operational in its final form, it will be used not only to power the satellite navigation system, but also to measure the exact value of the Greenwich meridian time (Coordinated Universal Time, UTC).

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