The World's First Nuclear Clocks Are Ticking, Opening a New Way to Investigate Dark Matter and Other Mysteries of Physics

Now, two independent teams of physicists have finally made a giant leap toward that goal. They’ve created the world’s first functioning nuclear clocks, which rely on an atom’s core, or nucleus.

A group in Europe posted their study on the preprint server arXiv on June 3, and a group in China posted their work on June 7. The findings, none of which have been peer reviewed, have implications beyond timekeeping. Nuclear clocks can help scientists gain new insights into fundamental physics and search for dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up most of the matter in the universe.

“This is an outstanding result,” says Victor Flambaum, a theoretical physicist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who was not involved in either study, to Science News’ Emily Conover about the European team’s paper. It demonstrated that their clock’s sensitivity to some dark matter was equal to or better than that of atomic clocks.