Methods for calibrating a cesium atomic clock using a pulsar time-scale

ABSTRACT Some millisecond pulsars exhibit extremely high rotational stability, which can form a pulsar-based time-scale. We employed a post-correction method to evaluate the feasibility of the pulsar time-scale (PT) as a time reference to calibrate the frequency of cesium clocks getting more accurate time signals. From the first date release of the international pulsar timing arrays, we chose PSR J1909–3744 and PSR J1713+0747 as the experimental objects to construct different pulsar time-scales. We studied three methods in detecting the relative frequency deviation of a cesium clock and considered four different periods of frequency correction. It was found that different pulsars have different properties in frequency corrections, and the established ensemble pulsar time-scale (EPT) is more reliable. For the best method, the accuracy of the frequency correction given by the established EPT is comparable to that given by the terrestrial time published by Bureau International des Poides et Measures. It indicated that PT has the potential in frequency correction at long term, which could improve the long-term ability of time-keeping in time laboratories.