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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 13: Nuclear Clocks

Q 13.5: Vortrag

Montag, 2. März 2026, 18:00–18:15, P 11

Towards Continuous-Wave Laser Excitation of the Th-229 Nuclear Isomer Sympathetically Cooled with Ca Ions — •Ke Zhang¹, Valerii Andriushkov^2,3, Yumiao Wang¹, Darius Fenner¹, Keerthan Subramanian¹, Florian Zacherl¹, Srinivasa Pradeep Arasada¹, Jonas Stricker^1,2, Christoph E. Düllmann^1,2,3, Dmitry Budker^1,2,3,4, Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler¹, and Lars von der Wense¹ — ¹Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany — ²Helmholtz Institut Mainz, Germnay — ³GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung — ⁴Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, USA

We investigate an experimental scheme for the continuous-wave laser excitation of the nuclear isomeric state in ²²⁹Th³⁺. Thorium recoil ions are extracted from a radioactive source, mass-selected to obtain purified ²²⁹Th³⁺, and injected into a linear Paul trap via an RF quadrupole guide. Inside the trap, the ²²⁹Th³⁺ ions are sympathetically cooled through Coulomb interaction with sub-Doppler-cooled ⁴⁰Ca⁺ ions, reaching the motional ground state in the Lamb–Dicke regime. A continuous-wave laser stabilized to the expected nuclear transition energy will coherently drive the isomeric transition. This approach aims to demonstrate the feasibility of precision nuclear spectroscopy in a sympathetically cooled trapped-ion system, enabling the way for ion-based nuclear optical clocks and advancing fundamental research in nuclear and atomic physics. The work is supported by the DFG Project TACTICa (grant agreement no. 495729045) and the BMFTR Quantum Futur II Project NuQuant (FKZ 13N16295A).

Keywords: Th-229 laser spectroscopy; Isomeric excitation; Sympathetic Cooling; Coulomb Crystal; Nuclear Optical Clock