Topic: nuclear clocks

The conference examines photon-based approaches to nuclear science and their applications. Topics include intense laser–plasma interactions, gamma-ray sources, spectroscopy, nuclear processes in stellar and laboratory plasmas, nucleosynthesis and nuclear clocks. Medical and industrial uses of laser-driven radiation, nuclear-material detection and strong-field quantum electrodynamics extend the programme. Invited and contributed talks are complemented by posters, including awards for students and early-career researchers.

Jun Ye discusses how laser science and increasingly large coherent quantum systems are expanding precision measurement into nuclear physics. Experiments now maintain coherence in thousands of atoms for minutes and resolve quantum states of the thorium-229 nuclear transition. A vacuum-ultraviolet frequency comb enables coherent excitation of that transition and connects its frequency directly to a highly precise atomic clock. The lecture examines how this connection between atomic and nuclear measurement could support new tests of fundamental physics and nuclear clocks containing billions of ab