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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Researchers at LMU Munich have put together a new review paper on the history of work on the Th-229 isomer, its current status, as well as potential implementations of a nuclear clock. The paper also investigates the properties of other candidates (aside from Th-229) to be used for a nuclear clock. It was assembled in […]
The nuClock consortium is set to organize a conference entitled NOCAN: Novel Optical Clocks in Atoms and Nuclei. The goal of the seminar is to discuss conceptually novel approaches to optical frequency standards and clocks. Despite the remarkable precision already realized in current atomic clock worldwide, there is a wide range of concepts for next-generation […]
The hyperfine interaction of the nucleus with the electron shell leads to energy shifts of electronic transitions that are easily accessible to laser spectroscopy. Now that Th-229m ions in the isomeric state became available at the LMU experiment, the PTB group performed laser spectroscopy on these ions and compared the spectra with Th-229 ions in […]
You want to meet the nuClock people and learn about the latest state of current research? Then head for the DPG meeting in Erlangen, which takes place March 5 – 9. Peter G. Thirolf of LMU Munich will give a plenary talk on Monday morning, and an entire session (A/Q 44) on Friday will be […]
Last week’s 3-day meeting in Heidelberg was a great success. With 33 participants, this was by far the largest nuClock meeting to date (Vienna 2014: 20 participants, Munich 2015: 24, Brussels 2016: 19). Aside from pretty much all the nuClock members, a large crowd of external guests joined the meeting: Koji Yoshimura from Okayama (Japan), […]
The core of the nuClock project is formed by eight European groups, which receive funding from the European Union. The nuClock team seeks to attract more and more scientists into the field of research on Th-229, and to foster communication and synergies among all Thorium groups world-wide. In order to increase the visibility of strong […]