October 10, 2013 – Martin Fraas, ETH, Zurich

Martin Fraas, ETH, Zurich

Title: Introduction to atomic clocks and some mathematical results regarding their operation.

Abstract: I will explain how atomic clocks operate, briefly describe the history and theoretical challenges of the field, and present a mathematically minded model of atomic clocks based on the quantum estimation theory. I will prove that the model has a stationary state and describe properties of this state. In particular, I derive a Cramer-Rao type bound on the clock time precision.