[time-nuts] New atomic clock

[Ralph Devoe]

       There's an interesting and more readable PRL by the same group,
published last year on June 2 .  Its on arXiv: 1110.2379v1 . or PRL 106,
223001 (2011).  They have already built the trap and have laser-cooled the
Thorium ions (cool pictures of the ion crystals). Their current  problem is
that the wavelength of the nuclear transition is not well known and its
hard to build a UV laser when you don't know exactly where to tune it.
Apparently the idea is due to a German physicist at the PTB named E. Peik.
If you search arXiv under "peik" you'll find a bunch of other papers on the
subject.
       If you google "nuclear shell model" you'll find a good Wikipedia
article on the nuclear energy levels. Oddly enough, there is a similarity
between the electronic orbitals and nucleon wavefunctions so that neutron
"orbits" is not complete nonsense.