Every year, the German Physics Society (DPG) offers a PhD thesis prize for each of its sections. This year, Lars von der Wense of LMU Munich was awarded the thesis prize in the section “Matter and Cosmos”. Congratulations to Lars, his supervisor Peter G. Thirolf, and the whole team at LMU for this prestigious recognition!
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 Th-229 nuclear isomer has been around for more than 40 years already, but two of its main properties, namely its energy and lifetime, are known only with very large error margins. While there is no experimental value for the bare isomer lifetime at all, there is at least some consensus on the isomer energy (somewhere between 6.3 and 10 eV). In their recent study (now available on the arXiv preprint server here), the Russian group at MEPhI suggests an energy of 7.1 eV and a lifetime of about half an hour for the bare isomer. These values are in agreement with all recent experiments, which is very good news. And it’s the first time since the Beck et al. measurement (more than 10 years ago !) that a research team dares to put forward a value of the isomer energy. Let’s hope that an independent experiment using a different approach will soon be able to confirm this value. Congratulations to the Russian team for their work!