The world's first nuclear clocks are ticking

Technology Engineering The world's first nuclear clocks are ticking Nuclear clocks may surpass their atomic forebears and help solve the universe's most difficult mysteries. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Timekeeping has officially entered its nuclear age. Two independent teams, one in Vienna, Austria and another in Beijing, China have built working thorium-229 nuclear clock prototypes . Rather than track changes in an atom's electrons the way that current atomic clocks do, these nuclear versions use a laser that's tuned to the frequency where a thorium nucleus flips between two energy states for potentially even more accurate time keeping.