{"id":188555,"date":"2024-05-03T00:25:18","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T05:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/shedding-light-on-the-thorium-229-nuclear-clock-isomer"},"modified":"2024-05-03T00:25:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T05:25:18","slug":"shedding-light-on-the-thorium-229-nuclear-clock-isomer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/shedding-light-on-the-thorium-229-nuclear-clock-isomer","title":{"rendered":"Shedding Light on the Thorium-229 Nuclear Clock Isomer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/shedding-light-on-the-thorium-229-nuclear-clock-isomer2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers use a laser to excite and precisely measure a long-sought exotic nuclear state, paving the way for precise timekeeping and ultrasensitive quantum sensing.<\/p>\n<p>Any reliably produced, periodic phenomenon\u2014from the swing of a pendulum to the vibrations of a single atom\u2014can form the basis of a clock. Today\u2019s most precise timekeeping is based on extremely narrow electronic transitions in atoms, which resonate at optical frequencies. These stupendously precise optical atomic clocks lose just 1 second (s) in about 30 billion years. However, they could potentially be outperformed by a nuclear clock, which would instead \u201ctick\u201d to the resonant frequency of a transition that occurs in the atomic nucleus instead of in the electronic shell. The most promising candidate for this nuclear standard is an exceptionally low-energy and long-lived excited state, or isomer, of the isotope thorium-229 (<sup>229 <\/sup>Th). Researchers have now achieved the long-sought goal of exciting this transition with ultraviolet light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers use a laser to excite and precisely measure a long-sought exotic nuclear state, paving the way for precise timekeeping and ultrasensitive quantum sensing. Any reliably produced, periodic phenomenon\u2014from the swing of a pendulum to the vibrations of a single atom\u2014can form the basis of a clock. Today\u2019s most precise timekeeping is based on extremely [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}