Physicists have demonstrated all the ingredients of a nuclear clock — a device that keeps time by measuring tiny energy shifts inside an atomic nucleus. Such clocks could lead to vast improvements in precision measurements, as well as new insights into fundamental physics.
Researchers measured the frequency of light that causes nuclei of the rare isotope thorium-229 to shift to a higher energy state — the ‘tick’ of the nuclear clock — with an accuracy that is 100,000 times greater than the previous best effort. They did this by synchronising the energy transition with the tick of the world’s most accurate clock. The work was led by Jun Ye at JILA, a research institute in Boulder, Colorado, and published in Nature on 5 September1. “It’s really one of the most exciting papers in recent times,” says Marianna Safronova, an atomic physicist at the University of Delaware in Newark.
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