维也纳与北京科学家建成首台可运行的核时钟

Two independent research teams have built working nuclear clocks, demonstrating a new way to measure time using changes inside an atom’s nucleus. The experimental devices could eventually support more robust timekeeping and provide unusually sensitive instruments for investigating fundamental physics. The results, published in Nature on October 7 after earlier preprints appeared in June, come from a European collaboration involving TU Wien and Germany’s national metrology institute, PTB, and a Chinese team led by researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The achievement establishes that nuclear clocks can operate as functioning timekeepers. These first prototypes have yet to match the performance of the best optical atomic clocks, but they give researchers a working platform to improve. …