{"id":464717,"date":"2018-04-18T13:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T17:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=702468ea56d0224e16bcd193672c6ddd"},"modified":"2018-04-18T13:00:03","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T17:00:03","slug":"en-route-to-the-optical-nuclear-clock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=464717","title":{"rendered":"En route to the optical nuclear clock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The nucleus of thorium-229 possesses a property that is unique among all known nuclides: It should be possible to excite it with ultraviolet light. To date, little has been known about the low-energy state of the Th-229 nucleus that is responsible for this property. Together with their colleagues from Munich and Mainz, researchers at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have now performed the first-ever measurements &#8211; using optical methods &#8211; of some important properties of this nuclear state such as the shape of its charge distribution. In this way, a laser excitation of the atomic nucleus can be monitored, thus allowing an optical nuclear clock to be realized that &#8220;ticks&#8221; more precisely than present-day atomic clocks. The scientists have reported their results in the current issue of Nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The nucleus of thorium-229 possesses a property that is unique among all known nuclides: It should be possible to excite it with ultraviolet light. To date, little has been known about the low-energy state of the Th-229 nucleus that is responsible for &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=464717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":464718,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464717\/revisions\/464718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=464717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=464717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=464717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}