Colloquium with Thorsten Schumm
Tuesday, 4.3.25, 16:30
HS C
Students, Academic Staff
We invite you to our colloquium with guest Thorsten Schumm, TU Wien.
Laser Excitation and Spectroscopy of the Thorium-229 Nucleus
Among all known isotopes, Thorium-229 has the lowest nuclear excited state, only 8.4 eV above the ground state. This so-called “isomer” is accessible to VUV laser excitation and a plethora of applications at the interface of atomic and nuclear physics have been proposed, including a nuclear clock, a gamma laser and a sensitive detector for variations of fundamental constants. After decades of attempts to determine the exact isomer energy and other nuclear properties, we report on two experiments which resonantly excite the isomer by lasers and spectroscopically resolve the nuclear quadrupole splitting in a single crystal environment. This allows us to determine the sensitivity of the nuclear clock transition to variations of the fine structure constant, which exceeds schemes involving electron shell transitions in atoms or ions by 3 orders of magnitude.
DK-ALM Pretalk: Isaac Smith (Group of Hans J. Briegel)
Title: "Universal Quantum Computation Using Only Pauli Strings"
Organizers: K. Erath-Dulitz, H.-C. Nägerl, T. Schrabback