Novel design of an all-cryogenic RF pound circuit

We report on the design, construction and test of a new all-cryogenic RF Pound circuit used to stabilize a 100 MHz VCXO. Here, all active and passive RF components used to accomplish the phase modulation and detect a PM to AM conversion have been installed into the cryogenic environment. In conjunction with a high-Q cryogenic sapphire resonator a Pound discriminator sensitivity of 0.1 mV/Hz was seen experimentally. Based on this sensitivity and the noise properties of the pre-amplifier of the Pound signal, we calculate a limit of the oscillator´s Allan deviation as low as 4middot10^-16/radictau. Experimentally, the first experiments gave a stability of 1middot10^-13 at 1 second