For decades, researchers around the world had been working towards this goal – and now major advances are following in rapid succession. Vienna is now home to the world’s first nuclear clock that stabilizes itself, as is also customary in atomic clocks. This technology has the potential to significantly surpass the precision of previous atomic clocks.

A University of Texas at Dallas scientist and her colleagues have discovered an unusual atomic pattern in a uranium-based material that gives it a rare combination of magnetic properties, a finding that could open new pathways for designing advanced electronic and computer memory devices.

We now have a real clock. That, in essence, is the message behind not one, but two papers published in the journal Nature. In these articles, the research team led by Ekkehard Peik of the German National Metrology Institute (PTB) and Thorsten Schumm at the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) reports on its latest results, which are not only spectacular in themselves but were also achieved much sooner than expected. Following their 2024 breakthrough, when, after decades of research, the first laser excitation of the thorium nucleus finally succeeded, the researchers have now developed a much more precise—as well as more compact—laser system that enables genuine clock operation. Using the laser system built by PTB and the thorium-doped calcium fluoride crystals produced at TU Wien, the team in Vienna was for the first time able to show that its clock could operate stably for over 24 hours without user intervention. This new nuclear clock could prove even more accurate than today’s optical atomic clocks. Moreover, the technology represents a bridge between the fields of atomic and nuclear physics, enabling experiments of the highest precision.

Two studies on critical topology have recently been published in the internationally renowned journal Nature. These studies were led by the teams of Prof. Baile Zhang at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Prof. Jianhua Jiang at the University of Science and Technology of China, respectively. Prof. Xue-Jia Yu from the School of Physics at the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo (EIT), served as a co-corresponding author on both papers and provided key theoretical guidance in the related experimental collaborations.

Kagome metals have emerged as promising materials for exploring unusual superconductivity, but conflicting experiments have made it difficult to determine what drives their superconducting behavior. Now, researchers show that applying tensile strain to CsV3Sb5 separates two hidden superconducting states, raising the transition temperature while leaving its charge order unchanged. The findings establish strain as an independent tool for revealing and tuning unconventional superconductivity in quantum materials and related quantum systems worldwide.