PhD Studentship: Chemical design of materials for thorium nuclear clocks

This 3.5-year project is fully funded. The successful candidate will receive an annual tax free stipend (depending on circumstance) set at the UKRI rate (£20,780 for 2025/26). We expect the stipend to increase each year. Tuition fees will also be paid. Home students are eligible.

A funded PhD studentship is available in the field of computational inorganic chemistry. The project will involve prediction of new thorium compounds for next-generation clock devices.

The thorium-229 isotope has a nuclear excited state at 8.4 eV above the ground state that can be excited with a tabletop laser, as demonstrated for the first time in 2024 after a 50-year search. The transition holds great potential as a next-generation clock, outperforming atomic clocks by orders of magnitude. A major goal is development of a solid-state nuclear clock, where thorium-229 is present in a host crystal, which could be suitable for applications from millimetre-accurate GPS to earthquake prediction.

The performance of the clock device will be determined by the material used to make the crystal. In this project we will use electronic structure calculations guided by chemical understanding to discover new thorium compounds that could make good clocks. This will involve predicting structures, electronic properties, and optical spectra. This research area is highly interdisciplinary, and we anticipate opportunities to work closely with experimental and theoretical scientists from chemistry and physics. For relevant papers by our team, see: Physical Review Letters 133, 1, 013201 (2024); Nature 636, 8043, 603-608 (2024); Dalton Transactions 54, 10574-1058 (2025); Applied Physics Letters 126,11110 (2025).

Prior experience in computational chemistry is desirable but not necessary.

Applicants should have, or expect to achieve, at least a 2.1 honours degree or a master’s (or international equivalent) in a relevant science or engineering related discipline.

This project is open to UK students or EU students with settled status.

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