Nuclear atomic clock: Thorsten Schumm receives ERC Starting Grant
TU Vienna - With the awarding of the START prize in October 2009, Schumm embarked upon a great journey, and with the awarding of the ERC Starting Grant he has now taken a further step towards his goal of building a nuclear atomic clock. Since the beginning of the START project in January 2010, Thorsten Schumm has built up a research team - together with his colleagues Georg Steinhauser (Postdoc), Georg Winkler (PhD) and Michael Schreitl (PhD) - to drive the project forwards at the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics. How accurate is the clock? - . The radio-isotope 229 thorium is the only atom which can bridge the gap between the previously completely separate worlds of atomic and nuclear physics. The excitation state of its atomic nucleus has such exceptionally low energy that the methods of atomic physics, in particular spectroscopy with lasers, can be employed. The goal of the project is to demonstrate this "optical" nuclear transition and make it useable for applications and fundamental physics research. At present, we define a "second" as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a light wave, which causes a specific excitation of the electron shell of a caesium atom.
