A solid-state nuclear clock using a VUV frequency comb

Chuankun Zhang is a graduate student in the Ye group at JILA, NIST, and the University of Colorado Boulder, where he is working to develop an optical clock based on the thorium-229 nuclear transition. Together with his colleagues, he has contributed to multiple aspects of this effort, including generating and stabilizing a vacuum-ultraviolet frequency comb, fabricating thorium fluoride thin films, and demonstrating quantum state-resolved nuclear laser spectroscopy. Their ongoing work focuses on characterizing and improving the performance of this novel nuclear quantum platform for timekeeping.