Flipping a nuclear clock's state 1000x faster—how?

Thorium-229 has a uniquely low-energy nuclear excited state that makes it a candidate for next-generation atomic clocks and quantum sensors. Switching that nuclear state precisely has required hundreds of milliseconds using standard laser techniques. By applying a "shortcut-to-adiabatic" pulse scheme through the atom's electron-nucleus coupling, the operation time drops to hundreds of microseconds—a thousandfold speedup—while still transferring population at nearly 80% efficiency.