Disciplining a Rubidium Atomic Clock Based on Adaptive Kalman Filter

Abstract

Rubidium atomic clocks have been used extensively in various fields, with applications such as a core component of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). However, they exhibit inherently poor long-term stability. This paper presents the development of a control system for rubidium atomic clocks. It introduces an adaptive Kalman filtering algorithm for the disciplining of a rubidium atomic clock, utilizing autocovariance least squares (ALS) to estimate the clock’s noise parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a high estimation accuracy. The standard deviation of the clock error between the steered rubidium atomic clock 1 Pulse Per Second (1PPS) and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) provided by the National Time Service Center (NTSC) is better than 2.568 nanoseconds(ns), with peak-to-peak values improving to within 11.358 ns. Notably, its frequency stability is reduced to 3.06 × 10−13 @100,000 s. The results for the rubidium atomic clock demonstrate that the adaptive Kalman filtering algorithm proposed herein constitutes an accurate and effective control strategy for the rubidium atomic clock discipline.