Max Planck-RIKEN-PTB Center for
Time, Constants and Fundamental SymmetriesRecent News
When world-leading teams join forces, new findings are bound to be made. This is what happened when quantum physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig combined atomic and nuclear physics with unprecedented accuracy using two different methods of measurement. Together with new calculations of the structure of atomic nuclei, theoretical physicists from the Technical University of Darmstadt and Leibniz University Hannover were able to show that measurements on the electron shell of an atom can provide information about the deformation of the atomic nucleus. At the same time, the precision measurements have set new limits regarding the strength of a potential dark force between neutrons and electrons. The results have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Please read more in the Physical Review Letters article ... >
Further information also in the press releases of the MPIK
and the press release of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt
(PTB).
The scientific journal Nature has listed PD Dr. Ekkehard Peik among the 10 people who have shaped science in 2024.
"Father time: the physicist on a mission to build the world’s first nuclear clock" is the headline in the prestigious Nature magazine’s
December issue, honoring him as one of the ten individuals who have influenced science in 2024: Ekkehard Peik, a physicist at the PTB (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt)
in Germany and our center co-director.
Earlier this year, he and his team achieved what had only been theorized for many years: the laser
excitation of a thorium-229 nucleus, causing it to undergo a quantum leap from one energy level to another. This scientific breakthrough
could make possible so-called nuclear clocks with unprecedented precision.
We cordially congratulate Ekkehard Peik on receiving this high scientific recognition.
Please read more in the following press releases:
Our center co-director Prof. Dr. Klaus Blaum is honored with the Stern-Gerlach Medal 2025 by the German Physical Society (DPG)
“In recognition of his pioneering developments of Penning ion traps into spectroscopic precision measuring instruments and their
applications for tests of the four fundamental interactions, their symmetries, the fundamental constants and thus the standard model
of particle physics”.
This is the DPG’s most prestigious honor for outstanding achievements in experimental physics, and it is awarded
for work covering the whole field of physics.
The award will be presented in March 2025 during the 88th Annual Meeting of the DPG in Bonn, Germany.
We cordially congratulate Klaus Blaum on receiving the DPG’s most prestigious award in the field of experimental physics.
Please read more in the following press releases: