X-ray laser shows a possible route to substantially increased precision time measurement. An international research team has taken a decisive step toward a new generation of atomic clocks. At the European XFEL X-ray laser, the researchers have created a much more precise pulse generator based on
An artist’s rendition of the scandium nuclear clock: scientists used the X-ray pulses of the European XFEL to excite in the atomic nucleus of scandium the sort of processes that can generate a clock signal – at an unprecedented precision of one second in 300 billion years. Credit: European XFEL/Helmholtz Institute Jena, Tobias Wüstefeld/Ralf RöhlsbergerAn international research team has taken a decisive step toward a new generation of atomic clocks.
“Until now, however, no X-ray source was available that shone brightly enough within the narrow 1.4 feV line of scandium,” says Anders Madsen, leading scientist at the MID experiment station at the European XFEL, where the experiment took place. “That only changed with X-ray lasers like the European XFEL.”
Also important for the construction of atomic clocks is the exact knowledge of the resonance energy – in other words, the energy of the X-ray laser radiation at which the resonance occurs. Sophisticated extreme noise suppression and high-resolution crystal optics allowed the value of the scandium resonance energy in the experiments to be determined to within five digits of the decimal point at 12.38959 keV, which is 250 times more accurate than before.
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