Scandium-45: The Key to Clocks More Precise Than Atomic Ones ⚡ экспресс
The transition in the scandium-45 nucleus has a record-narrow natural width of 1.4 femtoelectronvolts and a quality factor of ~10^19, outperforming atomic clocks. Experiments at the European X-ray laser confirmed the long lifetime of the isomer and revealed a new channel of elastic fluorescence with an internal conversion coefficient of about 390. However, the nuclear scattering signal vanished 2 ms after excitation — the solid broadens the resonance hundreds of times. It's like trying to hear a whisper over the clangor of a forge.
Hidden inside the scandium-45 nucleus is a nearly perfect pendulum. Its oscillations — the emission of X-rays — are so steady that it ticks 10^19 times in half a second without ever missing a beat. That’s billions of times more stable than the best atomic clocks.
Scientists 'listened' to this pendulum by exciting the nuclei with an X-ray laser and using spectroscopy and light measurement. However, in a solid crystal, neighboring atoms jiggle like a wobbly table under a pendulum. This disorder from vibrations blurs the signal at least 500-fold, muddying the clock’s ideal rhythm. Even under these conditions, scandium-45 remains a record-breaker.
A nuclear clock based on it would notice a shift in time if raised by just one centimeter — gravity’s hand, just as Einstein predicted. This means we could not only improve navigation but also test whether the laws of physics have changed over billions of years.
🎯 Nuclear clocks based on scandium-45 will be so sensitive they'll show that time runs faster on the second floor than on the first.