AN OPTICAL-FIBER NETWORK FOR FREQUENCY COMPARISONS ESTABLISHED IN BOULDER.
In a joint program with the city of Boulder, the Department of Commerce, the University of Colorado University of Colorado may refer to: - University of Colorado at Boulder (flagship campus)
- University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
- University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center
- University of Colorado system
(UC), and the National Center for Atmospheric Research The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a non-governmental U.S.-based institute whose stated mission is "exploring and understanding our atmosphere and its interactions with the Sun, the oceans, the biosphere, and human society. , an optical-fiber network--BRAN (Boulder Research and Administrative Network)--has been installed connecting various organizations dispersed throughout the city. A number of network fibers have been assigned to NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. ; including a dark pair (no included optoelectronic interfaces) of fibers. These fibers connect optical systems at NIST to systems at JILA JILA Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (Space) on the UC campus. The distance along the fiber between these two sites is approximately 3.5 km. Exceptional microwave and optical frequency standards are located in these two locations, which provide the opportunity to study the performance of this direct fiber connection.
In preliminary experiments, NIST and JILA have demonstrated high short-term-stability transfer of frequency across the network. They first modulated the output of a 1.3 [micro]m laser at 2.3 GHz using a source locked to a hydrogen maser maser (mā`zər), device for creation, amplification, and transmission of an intense, highly focused beam of high-frequency radio waves. in the NIST time scale. This was transferred to the university over BRAN and then back to the division. The uncompensated diurnal variations of the time delay between the two sites were about 140 ps, and can be controlled well below this level.
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