München 2019 – scientific programme
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 32: Hauptvorträge III
HK 32.1: Invited Talk
Wednesday, March 20, 2019, 11:30–12:05, Plenarsaal
Where nuclear physics meets quantum optics — •Adriana Pálffy — Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg
Nuclear physics studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions. While not particularly spectacular from nuclear physics point of view, the photo-excitation of low-lying nuclear states opens the new field of nuclear quantum optics and may bring substantial progress in the field of metrology. These developments aim to exploit the fact that nuclei are very clean quantum systems, well isolated from the environment and benefiting from long coherence times. The lecture will follow these perspectives at the borderline between nuclear and atomic physics on the one hand side and metrology and quantum optics on the other hand side. First, the present status of the efforts to use the 229Th isomer at approx. 8 eV for a nuclear frequency standard will be discussed.
Second, the prospects of mutual control between nuclear transitions and x-rays will be discussed in the light of novel coherent x-ray sources such as the x-ray free electron laser. Combining the advantages of x-rays and nuclei, a prominent incentive is to use nuclei to exploit x-rays as the future quantum information carriers or for novel probing technologies based on quantum effects. Turning the tables, the control of nuclear transitions with strong x-ray sources would open the possibility to use long-lived nuclear excited states as a compact and clean energy storage solution. The lecture will follow the developments on the emerging field of x-ray quantum optics and focus on the mutual control of coherent x-ray radiation and nuclear transitions.