For nearly 50 years, physicists have dreamed of the secrets they could unlock by raising the energy state of an atom's nucleus using a laser. The achievement would allow today's atomic clocks to be ...

A collaboration between researchers in the US and Germany has made a major breakthrough in optical nuclear clocks, achieving laser-based excitation of Thoria-229 in a non-transparent host material.

There are significantly different architectures for what are known as “atomic” clocks. Optically driven atomic clocks offer a new set of performance attributes. The optical atomic clocks use paired ...