Researchers at UCB and UCLA develop a groundbreaking method to build less radioactive and cheaper nuclear clocks using thorium thin films.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have collaboratively found a new approach to building nuclear clocks using thorium thin films. The technological leap is equivalent to the use of semiconductors and integrated circuits in electronics and will allow the building of nuclear clocks that are 1000x less radioactive and less expensive, a press release said.
As scientists look for more accurate means of measuring time, nuclear clocks are proving to be much more accurate than the atomic clocks we have been using thus far. Since nuclear clocks use the energy transitions inside the atom’s nucleus for their timekeeping, they are more accurate and less prone to perturbations from outside forces. Nuclear clocks are also easily portable, making their widespread adoption possible. However, the accuracy of the nuclear clock comes at a heavy cost. At the core of the nuclear clock is thorium-229, which is rare, expensive, and highly radioactive. To enhance their practicality, a team led by Jun Ye, a professor of physics at UCB, and Eric Hudson, a professor at UCLA, used thin films of thorium tetrafluoride (ThF4) to build nuclear clocks that are 1,000 times less radioactive and cheaper to build.While thorium-based nuclear clocks have been in the works for over a decade, Jun Ye’s team at UCB has been working on using thorium thin films since 2017. The team experimented with thorium dioxide (ThO2) since it has a lower bandgap and facilitates electron emission. More recently, researchers at institutes such as CERN, UCLA, and others have also observed photon emissions. “With only a slight change of procedure, we could produce some ThF4 thin films using the apparatus originally built for ThO2 thin film production,” explained Chuakun Zhang, a researcher in the Ye lab, in an email toThe team used the physical vapor deposition (PVD) process, where ThF4 was heated in a chamber till it vaporized
NUCLEAR CLOCKS THORIUM THIN FILMS TIME MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGY
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