![]() ![]() The projects will unfold at 95 universities and research centers in 20 countries.Īlso contributing to the nuclear clock project will be researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (Heidelberg) and the Fraunhaufer Institute for Laser Technology (Aachen). She is one of 126 principal investigators overall. Eight projects, including Safronova’s, involve scientists based in the United States. The 2019 competition was the first to include researchers from outside Europe. The awards are part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The nuclear clock project is one of 37 projects to receive funding in the 2019 ERC competition, which allows groups of two to four researchers to collaborate on a project none could do alone. The ERC grant, worth more than $15 million over a six-year period, will provide funding for building the nuclear clocks and exploration of fundamental physics. “I want to discover natural phenomena we don’t yet know about,” she said. It is also extremely sensitive to some of the candidates for dark matter - the “missing matter” particles that are still unknown but make up most of the matter in the universe. The nuclear clock is expected to be far more sensitive - by five or six magnitudes of order - than atomic clocks are to variations in fundamental constants of nature. ![]() Her interest is in the new opportunities the nuclear clock will provide to search for undiscovered “new physics” effects. Safronova brings theoretical expertise to the team. No other known nucleus has transition energy that can be accessed by laser, which is a necessary part of building the clock. ![]() The nuclear clock, which has not yet been built but has been on the radar of physicists for more than 15 years, is based on transition energy of the thorium-229 nucleus. She joins a team of pioneers in the field - Thorsten Schumm of Vienna University of Technology, Ekkehard Peik of Physicaklisch-Technishe Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig and Peter Thirolf of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Now a four-investigator team that includes University of Delaware physicist Marianna Safronova has won a prestigious “Synergy Grant” from the European Research Council to build a new type of clock - the nuclear clock. ![]() Many advances have been made since the launch of the GPS satellites and the best world clock is now accurate to within one second every 30 billion years. Newswise - The atomic clocks that give extraordinary precision to the Global Positioning System (GPS) are based on transitions between energy states of atoms. News Research News Releases Journal News Medical News Science News Life News Business News Expert Pitch Google Fact Check Research Alert Marketplace News With Video/Audio Multimedia RSS Feeds by Follow us on Twitter (opens in new tab) or Facebook.Latest News Coronavirus News Currently Embargoed "That's really significant for a lot of real-world applications, where our laser looks a lot more like what you would take out into the field."įollow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter (opens in new tab). "The amazing thing is that we demonstrated similar performance as the JILA group despite the fact that we're using an orders of magnitude worse laser," Kolkowitz said. The other study, led by a research institute in Colorado called JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), set the world record overall for the most precise frequency difference. SpaceX's Amazing Falcon Heavy Triple Rocket LandingĬoincidentally, an unrelated study in the same issue of Nature published a frequency difference between the top and bottom of a dispersed cloud of atoms about 10 times better than the UW–Madison group. Ultraprecise Atomic Clock Network on the Hunt for Dark Matter SpaceX's Falcon Heavy: Latest News, Images and Video Ultimately, the researchers detected a difference in the ticking rate between two atomic clocks "that would correspond to them disagreeing with each other by only one second every 300 billion years - a measurement of precision timekeeping that sets a world record for two spatially separated clocks," the university said. The team ran the experiment over 1,000 times to measure the difference, finding more precision in that measurement over time. The group then attempted to measure differences between clocks precisely, because two groups of atoms in slightly different environments will "tick" at different rates due to changes in magnetic fields or gravity. "But because the clocks are in the same environment and experience the exact same laser light, the effect of the laser drops out completely." "Normally, our laser would limit the performance of these clocks," Kolkowitz said. NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock, seen here in an artist's illustration, will test out new technology to for deep-space navigation. ![]()
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