New design of the compact cold atoms clock HORACE

In the compact cold atoms clock HORACE caesium atoms are successively laser cooled, submitted to a Ramsey microwave interrogation scheme and then detected by linear absorption directly inside the microwave cavity. The whole physics package and optical bench have been entirely redesigned to optimize such an in-situ detection and to perform a normalization scheme. Main efforts have been concentrated on technical issues such as magnetic shielding, microwave cavity polishing and tuning, use of fast mechanical switches to realize the optical sequence.