{"id":243128,"date":"2026-08-24T17:06:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T22:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/mapping-thoriums-preferred-sites-could-pave-the-way-for-nuclear-clocks"},"modified":"2026-08-24T17:06:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T22:06:02","slug":"mapping-thoriums-preferred-sites-could-pave-the-way-for-nuclear-clocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/mapping-thoriums-preferred-sites-could-pave-the-way-for-nuclear-clocks","title":{"rendered":"Mapping thorium\u2019s preferred sites could pave the way for nuclear clocks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mapping-thoriums-preferred-sites-could-pave-the-way-for-nuclear-clocks2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For decades, physicists have used a technique called M\u00f6ssbauer spectroscopy to peer inside solid materials, revealing fine details of their surroundings by studying how their atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit gamma rays.<\/p>\n<p>Through new research published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.aea7978\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Science<\/i><\/a>, a team led by Takahiro Hiraki at Okayama University has pushed this approach into entirely new territory, using visible-adjacent light instead of gamma rays to study the nuclei of thorium-229 atoms. The advance offers a promising new route toward nuclear clocks, devices that could one day keep time more precisely than anything built before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For decades, physicists have used a technique called M\u00f6ssbauer spectroscopy to peer inside solid materials, revealing fine details of their surroundings by studying how their atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit gamma rays. Through new research published in Science, a team led by Takahiro Hiraki at Okayama University has pushed this approach into entirely new territory, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1965,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243128","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}