This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For decades, researchers around the world have been working toward this goal—and now major advances are following in rapid succession. Vienna is now home to the world's first nuclear clock that stabilizes itself, as atomic clocks typically do.
This system has been shown to remain stable for more than 24 hours without intervention, and the related findings are published in the journal Nature. The technology has the potential to significantly surpass the precision of previous atomic clocks. It is an important step toward a new kind of high-performance metrology, allowing a range of physical quantities to be measured with previously unattainable precision.
For decades, researchers had suspected that thorium atomic nuclei possess a special property that makes them an ideal tool for extremely precise measurements: They have two different energy states whose energies are extremely close together. Because the energy gap between these two states is so small, it is possible to use a laser to deliberately "switch" the atomic nucleus from one state to the other. In other atomic nuclei, the energy gaps are much larger, which is why they do not respond to laser light.
In April 2024, the team led by professor Thorsten Schumm at the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien, together with the team led by professor Ekkehard Peik at PTB Braunschweig, succeeded for the first time in finding this long-suspected nuclear transition: They were able to show that thorium nuclei can be excited with laser beams. In the fall of the same year, the team demonstrated that this could be used to build a high-precision clock: The thorium nucleus excitation apparatus was coupled to a conventional optical atomic clock, and the thorium nuclei were used as a timekeeper. Strictly speaking, however, this was not yet the kind of nuclear clock that can be used to set precision records.
"What you really want is a self-stabilizing nuclear clock," explains Schumm. "The basic idea is simple: you have a laser and you have thorium. The laser changes the energy state of the thorium nuclei, and the thorium nuclei are used to stabilize the frequency of the laser." At the heart of the nuclear clock is a crystal containing thorium atoms, produced at TU Wien.
This crystal is irradiated with a laser. "The oscillation of this laser light can be used for timekeeping, but the laser frequency can shift slightly from time to time, for example due to temperature fluctuations," explains Schumm. "For high-precision measurements, you therefore need a mechanism to keep the laser frequency exactly stable, so that the clock continues to tick with precisely the same rhythm." In ordinary atomic clocks, atoms and the energy states of their electrons are used for this purpose—Schumm's team is now using thorium nuclei instead.
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