All articles tagged with #thorium 229
Chinese researchers say a fluorinated borate crystal can convert laser light to 145.2 nm ultraviolet, enabling extremely precise thorium-229–based nuclear clocks that could support GPS-free navigation for submarines, missiles, and spacecraft. If perfected, this could improve “dead reckoning” navigation and reduce reliance on GPS, though practical deployment remains uncertain and the technology is far from ready.
Physicists are closing in on a nuclear clock that would use transitions in the thorium-229 nucleus to time events, following a 2024 laser breakthrough that pinpointed the key energy transition. The remaining challenge is building a stable 148-nanometer ultraviolet laser to drive the transition. Teams across China, Europe, Japan and the US are assembling the components, with some researchers predicting initial measurements as early as 2026, which could yield a compact, noise-resistant clock that may surpass current optical atomic clocks.
Researchers have proposed using a thorium-229 nuclear clock, which offers unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity, to detect dark matter's faint effects, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of this elusive substance and advancing precision timekeeping technology.
Scientists have used laser-excited thorium-229 to develop a highly sensitive method for detecting ultralight dark matter, leveraging its unique nuclear transition to probe interactions with forces much weaker than gravity, opening new avenues in fundamental physics research.
Scientists have developed a new method using thorium-229 in a nuclear clock to detect dark matter by measuring tiny shifts in atomic resonance frequencies, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of the universe's elusive dark matter and offering unprecedented precision in detection.
Scientists are developing a nuclear clock using thorium-229 to detect dark matter by measuring tiny shifts in atomic nuclei's absorption spectrum, which could reveal dark matter's influence even if it is 100 million times weaker than gravity. This innovative approach could significantly advance our understanding of dark matter and improve precision in various scientific fields.
Researchers in Germany and Austria have made progress in developing a nuclear clock based on thorium-229, demonstrating the ability to put nuclei of the isotope into a low-lying metastable state with exceptionally low excitation energy. This advancement could lead to a more stable and practical solid-state nuclear clock, offering potential applications in detecting time variations related to new physics beyond the Standard Model and measuring time dilation due to gravitational differences.
Scientists, including researchers from LMU, have made significant progress in the development of nuclear clocks, which could provide a more precise measurement of time and offer insights into fundamental forces of the universe. By accurately characterizing the excitation energy of thorium-229, the element that could be used as the timekeeping component in nuclear clocks, the researchers have taken a critical step towards realizing this technology. Nuclear clocks could open up new research fields that cannot be explored with atomic clocks and have potential practical applications, such as detecting changes in the Earth's gravitational field. The first prototypes of nuclear clocks could be developed within the next decade.
Researchers propose a new approach to study thorium-229, the only nuclear transition that can potentially be interrogated with lasers, by using highly charged ions that have only three electrons left in their shell. The ions are accelerated to almost the speed of light in a particle accelerator, allowing them to be excited with a conventional laser in the visible wavelength range. This opens up promising and diverse perspectives for fundamental physics research, including the possibility of testing fundamental constants of nature and searching for particles or fields that go beyond the Standard Model.
Researchers at CERN's ISOLDE facility have made a key step towards building a nuclear clock based on a periodic transition between two states of an atomic nucleus, specifically the nucleus of an isotope of thorium. Such a clock could be more precise than today's most precise atomic clocks and could serve as a sensitive tool to search for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model. The team produced thorium-229 nuclei in the isomeric state in a novel way and investigated the nuclei using vacuum-ultraviolet spectroscopy, achieving a seven times more precise measurement of the isomer's energy than previous measurements.