Nuclear Clock

JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye and his team's revolutionary work on nuclear clock technology was recently highlighted in a feature by Scientific American. The article delves into the creation of the world’s first nuclear clock, developed in Boulder, Colorado, which builds upon decades of research into precision timekeeping. Nuclear clocks, which rely on the ticking of atomic nuclei rather than atomic electrons, promise to surpass the precision and accuracy of current atomic clocks, which have set the standard for international timekeeping for decades.

In a recent CNN article, groundbreaking research led by JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye and his team was highlighted for its remarkable advancements in nuclear clock technology. The article emphasized how their work builds upon the pioneering efforts of scientists who embedded thorium-229 into crystals in 2023, allowing for enhanced signal tracking by suppressing noise from nuclear decay.

Jun Ye, a JILA and NIST Fellow and CU Boulder Professor of Physics, and his team have made headlines in Quanta Magazine for their groundbreaking work on nuclear timekeeping. Graduate student Chuankun Zhang led the team in observing a thorium-229 nuclear transition—an elusive process that could redefine how we measure time.