0000000000512339
AUTHOR
Vincent Giordano
Cross-Spectrum PM Noise Measurement, Thermal Energy, and Metamaterial Filters.
International audience; Virtually all commercial instruments for the measurement of the oscillator PM noise make use of the crossspectrum method (arXiv:1004.5539 [physics.ins-det], 2010). High sensitivity is achieved by correlation and averaging on two equal channels, which measure the same input, and reject the background of the instrument.We show that a systematic error is always present if the thermal energy of the input power splitter is not accounted for. Such error can result in noise underestimation up to a few decibels in the lowest-noise quartz oscillators, and in an invalid measurement in the case of cryogenic oscillators. As another alarming fact, the presence of metamaterial com…
Frequency Stability Measurement of Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillators with a Multichannel Tracking DDS and the Two-Sample Covariance
This article shows the first measurement of three 100 MHz signals exhibiting fluctuations from 2E-16 to parts in 1E-15 for integration time tau between 1 s and 1 day. Such stable signals are provided by three Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillators (CSOs) operating at about 10 GHz, also delivering the 100 MHz output via a dedicated synthesizer. The measurement is made possible by a 6-channel Tracking DDS (TDDS) and the two-sample covariance tool, used to estimate the Allan variance. The use of two TDDS channels per CSO enables high rejection of the instrument background noise. The covariance outperforms the Three-Cornered Hat (TCH) method in that the background converges to zero "out of the box," wi…