Marianna Safronova and colleagues from the Univ. of Delaware and from the Kurchatov Institute in St. Petersburg have performed new atomic structure calculations for Th⁺and Th²⁺that are used to relate measured spectroscopic isotope shifts to differences of the nuclear charge radii. Such calculations are notoriously difficult for these thorium ions because of strong configuration mixing of the electrons. Combined with experimental data on isotope shifts in Th⁺from ²²⁷Th to ²³²Th, measured at KfK Karlsruhe in 1989, and the recent results on isotope shifts of Th²⁺obtained by PTB and LMU within nuclock, they provide a more reliable picture of the thorium nuclear charge radii, including an improved value for the radius change between ²²⁹Th and the^229mTh isomer: Excitation to the isomeric state increases the charge radius by less than 0.02%. The work is published in Physical Review Letters.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.213001

Starting with October 22., Tomas Sikorsky is enforcing the TU Wien Thorium team. Tomas has worked on NMR during his masters and on ion collisions with ultra cold gasses during his PhD in the team of Roee Ozeri at Weizmann. In Vienna, he will establish detection of the Thorium isomer via nuclear quadrupole resonance spectroscopy (NQRS). Welcome Tomas!

This year’s European Frequency and Time Forum (EFTF) is already the 32nd edition of this conference series and will take place in Torino, Italy, during the upcoming week. This conference is one of the global gathering of researchers involved with the measurement and distribution of time and frequencies; the conference webpage can be found here. Each year, a European Time and Frequency Award is given to an outstanding researcher to recognize his or her work. This year’s EFTF Laureate is Ekkehard Peik (PTB), one of the driving forces behind the nuClock project. He will receive the award “for seminal contributions to single-ion optical frequency standards and high-precision spectroscopy thereby establishing most stringent limits on possible variations of fundamental constants”. Congratulations to Ekkehard for being this year’s EFTF Laureate!

The TU Wien group and the Metrology Light Source (MLS) in Berlin (a part of PTB) have joined forces to directly excite the Thorium isomer in the VUV. In a measurement campaign about a year ago, Th-229 doped crystals were illuminated by tunable undulator radiation at the MLS facility. A wavelength region between 124 and 240 nm was probed (5.2 to 10 eV) at illumination & detection times between 30 and 600 seconds. The result of this study has now been made available on the arXiv preprint server (find the publication here).

In short, massive photoluminescence masked any possible gamma emission of the isomer. Three different types of photocathodes were used (Cs-Te, Cs-I, diamond), where only the Cs-I version was capable of supressing the photoluminescence at longer wavelengths to a degree that allowed researchers to draw any conclusions on the energy and lifetime of the isomer. Assuming radiative decay as the only decay channel, an isomer lifetime between 0.2 and 1.1 seconds can be excluded for an isomer energy between 7.5 and 10 eV (the region of highest sensitivity of the Cs-I detector). This study complements earlier work in the group of Eric Hudson at UCLA, where a parameter region of similar energy, but longer lifetime was excluded. Also, the results of this study are in agreement with the work at LMU.

Although not successful in this campaign, the results give direct input to the design and protocol of the next round of measurements.