A respected presence in his Colorado professional community, Andrew Kortyna addresses complex experimental research questions spanning physics and chemistry. A research program Andrew Kortyna previously guided focused on precisely measuring atomic cesium’s structure, which is vital to developing atomic clocks with even greater accuracy.
With pendulums traditionally used to measure time and more recent quartz crystal-based clocks, even the most well maintained mechanical device ultimately becomes inaccurate. By contrast, atoms have precise vibrational frequencies that provide a much more accurate and consistant measurement of time. For this reason, since 1967, the definition of a second has been 9,192,631,770 cycles of the microwave radiation required to excited transitions between the two lowest states of an atom of the element cesium.
The cesium atomic clock employs cesium atoms that are funneled past microwaves down a vacuum tube. If the microwave frequency is precisely adjusted to a resonance of the cesium atoms, the cesium atoms change energy states.
A detector at the tube’s end is tasked with counting the number of cesium atoms reaching it that have a changed energy state. When the microwave frequency is as finely tuned to 9,192,631,770 cycles per second as possible, a greater number of cesium atoms reach the detector.
Through a feedback loop, the detector synchronizes the microwave generator with the peak number of cesium atoms that reach it. Once the 9,192,631,770 cycle frequency count is reached, a second ticks off.
With extremely accurate timekeeping required for applications such as electrical grids, high-speed electronic communications, and GPS, the top US atomic clocks are housed at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder, CO.
