Nuclear clocks could be the best timepiece in the universe

The discovery of an elusive flash of light from the nucleus of the element thorium, which physicists have been hunting for decades, brings us a step closer to building a nuclear clock. This could be the most precise timepiece in the cosmos and help probe our understanding of the universe.

You may have already heard of atomic clocks, which use the energy levels of electrons around a nucleus to tell time – each electron can only have certain, fixed …