Estimation of Parameters in Models for Cesium Beam Atomic Clocks.

This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to the use of the Kalman filter in modeling atomic clocks and obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of the model paramaters from data on an ensemble of clocks. Tests for the validity of the model and confidence intervals for the parameter estimates are discussed. Techniques for dealing with unequally spaced and partially or completely missing multivariate data are described. The existence of deterministic frequency drifts in clocks is established and estimates of the drifts are obtained.