Thorsten Schumm wins ERC award

Champagne again!!! After the national START price now the european STARTing Grant. The Thorium Project is now funded and supported by the European Research Council (ERC). The european comission has not yet published the results of the 2010 call, so statistics will follow later. Rumor has it, that there are 7 awards in Austria, some of them are good friends from the “quantum community”. Congratulations to Francesca Ferlaino and Gregor Weihs in Innsbruck. Here’s the press release from the TU Vienna and some media coverage from Standard. More press releases and articles can be found in the press section.

The article to put under the pillow

For all of you who are at least remotely interested by the Thorium Project: THIS is the paper to read this month – Physical Review Letters 104, 200802 (2010). Eric Hudson and his coworkers at UCLA describe what is the state of knowledge concerning using 229-Thorium in a crystal for building an atom clock. Print it, read it, put it under your pillow… It’s really an exciting study, and it’s prominently featured at physicsworld.com (where I stole the image, copyright protectors forgive me). Following the article there is a blog discussion on the topic which unfortunately concentrates a little too much on wormholes, “dense aether theory”, and fractal randomness. Still, it’s really great work, thank’s to Eric and his team!

Thorium travels

Travelling on a mission from the (Nordic) god.  Last week, Thorsten went to Brussels, Berlin, London, Keele UK, and back to Vienna in one week. Here’s the report…

Brussels was the second attempt for a hearing in front of the ERC-Starting Grant commission, the first being cancelled very last minute because of a certain volcano in Iceland. This time it worked out, so after (literally) hours of waiting, I had the chance to tell my story in front of a very distinguished committee and answer their questions. Honestly, I have no clue how it went. Time (lots again) will tell, in general it’s a really short show (15 min talk, 15 min. questions) to convince anybody, but I guess seen the number of applicants (2873 this year!) there’s no other way. more

A solution … not for everybody…

The Thorium nuclear transition is predicted around 160 nm in the vacuum UV. Producing (laser) light at this wavelength is – to put it mildly – not trivial. Because almost all materials show high losses and dispersion at short wavelength (reflection and transmission) it is impossible to create a good cavity and hence a laser directly in the UV. Therefore, light from lower wavelength lasers has to be “upconverted” using nonlinear processes. The most common route at the moment seems to be high-harmonic generation in gas jets, using pulsed femtosecond lasers (a.k.a. frequency combs, see these papers). However, there is another way, which might even work for continuous lasers. It is based on a special non-linear crystal called KBBF, which works in the UV down to 156 nm (as demonstrated here). But there is one problem: YOU CANT GET IT!!! more

Office construction started

Greetings from the jack-hammer: The renovation of the 1st floor offices has started today, stripping everything to the foundation walls. Two new offices for the Thorium project will emerge here, one of them (mine, of course) from the former women’s toilet. The work should be finished first week of June, let’s keep fingers crossed. In the meantime, earplugs are strongly recommended. Here’s a little galley of images (the guy playing in the dust is Stephan Schneider). more

Thorium makes history

Thorium, thorium whereever you look! Whereas Thorsten’s thorium (Th-229) is a member of the no longer existing neptunium-237 decay chain, another nuclide came into scientific focus exactly one-hundred years ago: Thorium-230, a member of the uranium-238 decay chain. On 21 April 1910, the famous Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach made a fundamental discovery in the field of nuclear sciences. He reported that “ionium” (Th-230) was able to induce radioactivity in other materials if stored next to the ionium sample. Auer von Welsbach proclaimed that “in this process, a concussion of the elementary inventory of the irradiated samples takes place as well as changes in their chemical properties”. Today we call the observed scenario simply “neutron activation”. more

Vacuum UV spectrometer ordered

Today, after 3 months of planing together with the wonderful Erik Schoeffel from McPherson Inc. and another 4 months of wrestling with local administration, the Thorium project ordered it’s own, dedicated Vacuum UV spectrometer.  Covering a range from 120 nm to 200 nm (Deuterium lamp), it will be used to characterize calcium fluoride host crystals (transmision and luminescence, background measurements), quantify the UV frequency comb (yet to be built) and help in the search for the nuclear transition. Thanks to the TU Wien infrastructure program “Innovative Projekte” for (partially) funding this beauty. Amazingly, already in the ordering phase phase, the device delivered first results by producing detectable amounts of Administrarium. more

www.thorium.at goes online

It’s 1st of April but it’s not a joke: exactly on time, www.thorium.at goes online, the Thorium project has it’s own website!

This is the time to thank all the people who made this possible: first of all the great team of Datenwerk! With these people around, noone should even try this at home…First name to mention is Julia Petschinka who managed not only the entire project but also the client (that would be me). A big hand to Raoul “Digital” from transmitterdesign for making this look as great as it looks. More thanks to Gritta Bauer for project planing, bugfixing,  and make us all keep our deadlines. more

START/ERC/Wittgenstein awards handed out

The award ceremony took place in the “Remise”, a renovated train storage hall that was closed in 1970, then used by a youth cultural center as a skateboard park, and is now renovated as an event location. The setting was formal dinner-style with speeches, featuring the president of the FWF Christoph Kratky, the newly appointed Minister for Science and Education Beatrix Karl as well as the two Wittgenstein awardees Gerhard Widmer and Jürgen Knoblich. Unfortunately, the prices were handed out during dinner, so 20 seconds of fame  to compensate for an empty stomach. more

First commercial Thorium arrives at ATI

Today the first delivery of 229-Thorium arrived today from Eckert & Ziegler Isotope Products. It’s only 3.7 kBq, corresponding to some 10¹⁵ particles or 40 nanograms, but it’s still exciting. Now we have a background-free calibration source for gamma-spectroscopy…

By the way: if you know about any 229-Thorium that money can buy, PLEASE let us know!