Direct detection of the 229Th nuclear clock transition
Abstract
Today's most precise time and frequency measurements are performed with optical atomic clocks. However, it has been proposed that they could potentially be outperformed by a nuclear clock, which employs a nuclear transition instead of the atomic shell transitions used so far. By today there is only one nuclear state known which could serve for a nuclear clock using currently available technology, which is the isomeric first excited state in Th. Here we report the direct detection of this nuclear state, which is a further confirmation of the isomer's existence and lays the foundation for precise studies of the isomer's decay parameters. Based on this direct detection the isomeric energy is constrained to lie between 6.3 and 18.3 eV, and the half-life is found to be longer than 60 s for Th. More precise determinations appear in reach and will pave the way for the development of a nuclear frequency standard.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1710.11398,
title = {Direct detection of the 229Th nuclear clock transition},
author = {Lars von der Wense and Benedict Seiferle and Mustapha Laatiaoui and Jürgen B. Neumayr and Hans-Jörg Maier and Hans-Friedrich Wirth and Christoph Mokry and Jörg Runke and Klaus Eberhardt and Christoph E. Düllmann and Norbert G. Trautmann and Peter G. Thirolf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.11398},
year = {2017}
}