Welcome to JILA-PFC

The JILA Physics Frontier Center brings together talented investigators in a collaborative environment where they share goals, ideas, expertise, and technology in their quest to understand and control complex quantum systems. Four collaborative research activities support this endeavor: (1) Building complex matter from the ground up, (2) Engineering many-body systems using light-matter coupling, (3) Molecular coherence and transformation, and (4) Exploring high-impact synergistic research directions that evolve naturally from research on the frontiers of physics. In their explorations of these physics frontiers, atomic, molecular, and optical physicists work closely with biophysicists, and chemical physicists, as well as experts in precision measurement, nanoscience, and quantum information.

A New Quantum Drum Refrain

Quantum computers require systems that can encode, manipulate, and transmit quantum bits, or qubits. A creative way to accomplish all this was recently demonstrated by Adam Reed and his colleagues in the Lehnert group. The researchers...

Quantum Adventures with Cold Molecules

Researchers at JILA and around the world are starting a grand adventure of precisely controlling the internal and external quantum states of ultracold molecules after years of intense experimental and theoretical study. Such control of...

E. T. Phone Home

When Steven Spielberg’s adorable extra-terrestrial, E. T., wanted to phone home, he should have contacted an information theorist like JILA’s Graeme Smith. Smith could have at least explained how E. T. could have used a cell phone to send...

Precision Biomechanics

The Perkins group has made dramatic advances in the use of Atomic Force Microscopes (AFMs) to study large single biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids (DNA, RNA), that are important for life. After previously improving AFM...

Lassoing Colors with Atomic Cowpokes

Getting lasers to have a precise single frequency (color) can be trickier than herding cats. So it’s no small accomplishment that the Thompson group has figured out how to use magnetic fields to create atomic cowpokes to wrangle a specific...

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