Measurement of the blackbody radiation shift of the {sup 133}Cs hyperfine transition in an atomic fountain

We used a Cs fountain to measure the Stark shift of the ground-state hyperfine transition frequency in cesium (9.2 GHz) due to the electric field of the blackbody radiation. The relative shift at 300 K deduced from our measurements, including the leading and the second-order term in temperature, is (-1.45{+-}0.09)x10{sup -14} and agrees with our recent theoretical evaluation (-1.51{+-}0.07)x10{sup -14} [Micalizio et al. Phys. Rev. A 69, 053401 (2004)]. These values differ from that currently used (-1.735{+-}0.003)x10{sup -14}, with significant implications on frequency standards accuracy, on clocks comparison and on a variety of high-precision physics tests, such as the time stability of fundamental constants.