Ekkehard Peik, Head of the Time and Frequency Department at PTB and principle investigator in the Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers and the CRC DQ-mat, has received the 2025 Lower Saxony Science Award in the category of basic research. Lower Saxony’s Science Minister Falko Mohrs praised Peik for laying the foundations for a new class of ultra-precise clocks and for opening the field of nuclear laser spectroscopy.
In 2024, Peik’s team achieved the first-ever excitation of an atomic nucleus using laser light: in a thorium crystal prepared at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology) and with a newly developed laser at PTB, they hit the exact transition frequency—after around 20 years of work.
“We have made a new type of atomic clock possible—the nuclear clock,” says Peik. “This will allow us to test existing clocks even better and to investigate fundamental questions, such as the constancy of fundamental constants, with even greater precision.”
The Lower Saxony Science Award of the Ministry of Science and Culture honors outstanding achievements in research and teaching that are visible nationally and internationally.
