Temperature Compensated Sapphire Resonator for Ultra-Stable Oscillator Capability at Temperatures Above 77 Kelvin

We report on the design and test of a whispering gallery sapphire resonator for which the dominant (WGH xxxsubn11) microwave mode family shows frequency-stable, compensated operation for temperatures above 77 Kelvin. The resonator makes possible a new ultra-stable oscillator (USO) capability that promises performance improvements over the best available crystal quartz oscillators in a compact cryogenic package. A mechanical compensation mechanism, enabled by the difference between copper and sapphire expansion coefficients, tunes the resonator to cancel the temperature variation of sapphire's dielectric constant.