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  • RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

Scandium-45 nuclear-clock candidate driven by X-ray lasers

Precise timekeeping is key to many technologies, motivating the search for more-stable reference oscillators for use as clocks. The resonant X-ray excitation of a long-lived nuclear state in scandium-45 makes it a potential reference oscillator for a nuclear clock that could surpass atomic clocks in stability and resilience against external perturbations.

This is a summary of: Shvyd’ko, Y. et al. Resonant X-ray excitation of the nuclear clock isomer 45Sc. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06491-w (2023).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02791-3

‘Expert opinion’ and the figure are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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