Jenny Chen Rose Hills
Optical characterization of defects in thorium-doped calcium fluoride
My proposed research project will investigate thorium-doped calcium fluoride crystals through spectroscopy and other means in hopes of increasing the utility of thorium in the context of nuclear clocks and using it as a probe for fundamental physics. Unique to Th-229, due to miraculous circumstances, it has a nuclear transition at only 8.3eV compared to typical values of ~1MeV, motivating physicists to try to find and excite it with a tabletop UV laser. A controllable nuclear transition would be helpful in making atomic clocks, the world’s best timekeeping devices, more robust because they typically operate by referencing an electronic transition where electrons are sensitive to their surroundings.
Although people are now able to optically excite the transition in Th-229, it is not possible to readout the nuclear state on demand and currently relies on waiting much longer than its natural lifetime of 10 minutes. Hence, my project seeks to understand how defects in these crystals arise and interact with the thorium atoms, and can then be harnessed to readout and quench the system at our discretion by illuminating the crystal with light in the optical regime.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you for allowing me to more readily explore my interests and work on the forefront of AMO! Nuclear clocks are a relatively new area with lots of potential applications, so I'm excited to see what it's in store and help contribute to our understanding of how Thorium interacts with its host material.