In a breakthrough announced October 7, 2026, two independent research teams have successfully created the first operating nuclear clocks. Published simultaneously in Nature, these clocks utilize transitions within the atomic nucleus of thorium-229, rather than electron behavior as used in traditional atomic clocks.
A New Era for Precision Measurement
One team, led by Thorsten Schumm of Vienna University of Technology and Ekkehard Peik of PTB, the German National Metrology Institute, developed a clock achieving a precision of 10-15 – roughly an error of one second every 30 million years. The other was built by Shiqian Ding’s team at Tsinghua University in China.
How Nuclear Clocks Differ
While current atomic clocks rely on electron transitions, nuclear clocks offer potential advantages. They are expected to be more robust against external disturbances and operate at even higher frequencies than optical atomic clocks. This makes them uniquely suited for probing fundamental physics, including searches for dark matter.
Early Results and Future Potential
The newly developed thorium-229 nuclear clock has demonstrated a fractional frequency instability of 3 x 10-12 per square root of averaging time. Researchers project improvements by several orders of magnitude in future iterations. The clocks are already being used to constrain models of ultralight dark matter, showing sensitivity almost ten thousand times greater than existing atomic clocks.
The development represents over two decades of research, beginning with the proposal for a thorium-based nuclear clock in 2003 and culminating in the first laser excitation of an atom’s nucleus approximately two and a half years ago. The teams utilized millimetre-sized calcium fluoride crystals doped with thorium-229 to embed the nuclei.
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