Scientists in Vienna and Beijing create world's first nuclear clocks
The prototypes use thorium-229 nuclei and could improve navigation, communications and tests of fundamental physics, researchers said.
- Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing and in Vienna have developed working nuclear clocks, with initial results published in Nature indicating the Chinese timepiece is more stable than the one from Vienna.
- For more than 70 years, scientists have used atomic clocks to measure time, but these new nuclear devices build on a 2003 proposal to track the atom's core rather than orbiting electrons.
- Atomic nuclei are about 100,000 times smaller than atoms, making these clocks less sensitive to external electric fields; however, they currently remain less stable than the best atomic clocks.
- Beijing scientists demonstrated reproducibility by showing separately grown crystals kept the same time, while Thorsten Schumm of the European team said, "Now we have a fierce but friendly global competition."
- These nuclear clocks could help scientists probe fundamental questions like detecting dark matter, though further work involving more powerful lasers may be required to overcome existing stability limitations.
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A team of scientists from Vienna has developed a nuclear clock that promises to take time measurement to a new level. Thanks to the properties of the thorium, the device has achieved extraordinary precision during its first tests, although it still has room for improvement
Nuclear clocks are expected to surpass the accuracy of atomic clocks currently used in GPS and a host of other tasks. The post What time is it? First nuclear clocks promise new levels of accuracy appeared first on in.gr.
Scientists Create a Nuclear Clock So Precise It Barely Loses a Second in 30 Million Years
A self-stabilizing nuclear clock has achieved precision equivalent to roughly one second in 30 million years, though it still trails the best optical atomic clocks. For a clock that keeps time with laser light, even a slight shift in the laser’s frequency changes its rhythm. Researchers in Vienna have now built the world’s first nuclear [...]
Chinese scientists have developed a nuclear clock that achieves stable operation, shifting the measurement of ultra-precise time from electron transitions within atoms to transitions within atomic nuclei. Solid-state nuclear clocks offer potential advantages in miniaturization and engineering, and are expected to meet the high-precision time and frequency requirements of scenarios such as satellite navigation and deep space exploration. Accord…
China Reports Nuclear Clock With Sixfold Stability Gain Over Previous Device
The finding represents an early lead for the Chinese group in a precision-timekeeping race that opened only in 2024, when physicists first demonstrated direct laser excitation of a nuclear transition [1]. The device was built by a team affiliated with Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, the report stated [2]. It uses the same low-energy transition in thorium-229 nuclei embedded in calcium fluoride crystal…
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