The first joint meeting of the European Frequency and Time Forum and the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium was held in Besan\c{c}on, France, from April 13 to 16, 1999. The conference was hosted by the Société Fran\c{c}aise des Microtechniques et de Chronométrie and was co-chaired by Raymond Besson of the Ecole Nationale Supéreiure de Mécanique et des Microtechniques (ENSMM) and Donald Sullivan of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Fred Walls of NIST was the Technical Program Chairman and had the challenging task of overseeing a combined Program Committee of 104 technical experts. Raymond Besson also did an outstanding job managing the local arrangements. Approximately 150 oral papers and 170 poster papers were presented at the conference, and there were 44 exhibitors. With attendance at over 650 people, representing 30 nations, this was the largest single technical meeting on frequency and time ever held. Nobel Laureates William Phillips of NIST and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of Ecole Normale Supéreiure highlighted the meeting with plenary presentations.
To commemorate this unique meeting, a Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control was planned for papers presented at the symposium. All symposium authors were invited to submit expanded versions of their conference papers for this Special Issue on Frequency Control and Precision Timing. These papers were all subject to the normal peer review process to ensure the highest quality record of outstanding papers from the joint meeting. In all, approximately 61 papers will appear in this two volume Special Issue. It has been over 10 yr since the last Special Issue of UFFC Transactions was devoted to frequency control and timing.
This is volume one of the Special Issue on Frequency Control and Precision Timing, and it contains 32 papers. As is typical of the time and frequency community, the papers cover a wide range of technologies. The issue leads off with an invited paper by Alfred Pohl on wireless surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors, which is followed by three more sensor papers. The next seven papers involve acoustic resonators and range from resonator design, to phase noise, to improved oscillators. The paper by Fred Walls on sideband correlations provides a transition to three papers on microwave resonators and oscillators. The largest group of papers is on atomic frequency standards. These nine papers cover cesium fountains, optically pumped standards, conventional thermal beam cesium standards, and rubidium standards. Three papers (one in the Correspondence section) address the related fields of time and frequency measurements and transfer. Finally, this special issue is concluded with five papers on optical frequency standards.
The second volume of the Special Issue is expected to appear in the July or September 2000 issue of the UFFC Transactions.
© 2000, by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.