Gravitational Interactions in Nuclear Clocks
Abstract
Atomic clocks achieve extraordinary precision through quantum control over large ensembles of atoms, with precision increasing and atom number advancing steadily. Emerging nuclear clock technology encodes clock states in nuclear rather than electronic transitions, offering a new frontier for precision measurement. Here we study whether a large ensemble of such clock nuclei could be used to observe their mutual gravitational interaction. We investigate the gravitational redshift induced by neighboring atoms, including nuclear energy superpositions as sources of gravity, giving rise to a genuinely quantum gravitational interaction between pairs of nuclei. We find that the resulting clock frequency shift due to mutual gravity may become non-negligible for a macroscopic number of nuclei, for instance in a solid-state thorium clock, and we propose approaches to mitigate electromagnetic field effects by exploiting spatial symmetry and high-precision spectroscopy. We further discuss how energy-induced mass superpositions could be directly probed using external gravitational field sensors. By contrast, observing gravity-induced entanglement involving clocks would require substantially greater experimental advances due to decoherence from spontaneous emission. Taken together, our results suggest that nuclear clocks, either alone or in combination with complementary sensors such as optomechanical systems, may offer a future route toward probing gravity at short distances and testing gravitating quantum source masses beyond the Newtonian limit.
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BibTeX
@misc{beyer2026gravitational,
title = {{Gravitational Interactions in Nuclear Clocks}},
author = {Konstantin Beyer and Niklas E. Önne and Shimon Kolkowitz and Dolev Bluvstein and Mikhail Lukin and Jun Ye and Igor Pikovski},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.38832},
eprint = {2610.38832},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38832},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Gravitational Interactions in Nuclear Clocks
AU - Konstantin Beyer
AU - Niklas E. Önne
AU - Shimon Kolkowitz
AU - Dolev Bluvstein
AU - Mikhail Lukin
AU - Jun Ye
AU - Igor Pikovski
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.38832
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38832
AB - Atomic clocks achieve extraordinary precision through quantum control over large ensembles of atoms, with precision increasing and atom number advancing steadily. Emerging nuclear clock technology encodes clock states in nuclear rather than electronic transitions, offering a new frontier for precision measurement. Here we study whether a large ensemble of such clock nuclei could be used to observe their mutual gravitational interaction. We investigate the gravitational redshift induced by neighboring atoms, including nuclear energy superpositions as sources of gravity, giving rise to a genuinely quantum gravitational interaction between pairs of nuclei. We find that the resulting clock frequency shift due to mutual gravity may become non-negligible for a macroscopic number of nuclei, for instance in a solid-state thorium clock, and we propose approaches to mitigate electromagnetic field effects by exploiting spatial symmetry and high-precision spectroscopy. We further discuss how energy-induced mass superpositions could be directly probed using external gravitational field sensors. By contrast, observing gravity-induced entanglement involving clocks would require substantially greater experimental advances due to decoherence from spontaneous emission. Taken together, our results suggest that nuclear clocks, either alone or in combination with complementary sensors such as optomechanical systems, may offer a future route toward probing gravity at short distances and testing gravitating quantum source masses beyond the Newtonian limit.
ER -