The Maximum Weight in UTC: Proposal for a New Approach

The goal of this work is the improvement of the long-term stability of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). To achieve this purpose a comprehensive analysis of the atomic clocks participating in the calculation of UTC is presented. We focus our analysis on the hydrogen masers, the only clocks reaching the maximum weight in UTC. We observed that the present weighting algorithm fails to assign the maximum weight to H-masers with the best stability (predictability) only and too many clocks reach the maximum weight. To improve the process, we present a new way to generalize the maximum weight in the weighting algorithm of UTC based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (K-K-T) conditions. The method succeeds in improving the longterm stability of UTC.