Demonstration of a time scale with the 87Sr optical lattice clock at NTSC

Abstract

Optical clocks have been applied to the generation of time scales since they provide superb uncertainty and instability in recent years. This paper presents the simulations about the impact of the optical clock’s operational strategies on the performance of the generated time scale through two distinct steering algorithms. By post-processing the measured frequency difference between the 87Sr optical lattice clock and the hydrogen maser at the National Time Service Center, we realized an “optically steered” time scale TS(Sr), and the variation of the time difference TT(BIPM22)-TS(Sr) is 0.1 ns during the modified Julian date 59794–59819.