Freiburg 2024 – scientific programme

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SYAS: Awards Symposium

SYAS 1: Award Symposium

SYAS 1.3: Prize Talk

Tuesday, March 12, 2024, 16:00–16:30, Paulussaal

Quantum x-ray nuclear optics: progress and prospects — •Olga Kocharovskaya — Texas A&M Univ., College Station, US — Laureate of the Herbert-Walther-Prize 2024

Quantum x-ray nuclear optics is a fast-developing branch of quantum optics dealing with hard x-ray photons and nuclear ensembles. Main advantages of hard x-ray photons are high efficiency of the single photon detectors, possibility of a tight focusing, deep penetration into medium and potentially broad bandwidth. Main advantage of nuclear ensembles in comparison to atomic ones is lower sensitivity to electric and magnetic perturbations. This opens prospects for superior clocks, quantum memories and other quantum technologies. We will discuss several recent advantages in this field. It includes successful resonant excitation of Sc-45 isomer at 12.4 keV with x-ray pulses from EuXFEL [1]. While the only candidate studied so far for nuclear clock was Th-229 isomer [2], resonant excitation of Sc-45 establishes this isomer as another promising candidate for nuclear clock. It also includes recently predicted [3] and experimentally demonstrated [4] quantum storage of the hard x-ray photons in ensemble of nuclei, coherent control of the single gamma-ray waveforms [5] and phenomenon of acoustically induced transparency for hard x-ray photons, an analogue of the EIT and Autler-Towns effects in optics. It was shown that propagation of photons within the transparency window can occur at low group velocity about 10 m/s. [1] Yu. Shvydko et al., Nature 622, 471 (2023). [2] S. Kraemer et al., Nature 617, 706 (2023). [3] X. Zhang et al., PRL 123, 250504 (2019). [4] S. Velten et al., Nature Photonics (submitted). [5] F. G. Vagizov et al., Nature 508, 80 (2014).

Keywords: quantum x-ray optics; quantum memory; nuclear clock; Sc-45 nuclear isomer; XFEL