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.

How Cold Can a Tiny Drum Get?

Bob Peterson and his colleagues in the Lehnert-Regal lab recently set out to try something that had never been done before: use laser cooling to systematically reduce the temperature of a tiny drum made of silicon nitride as low as allowed...

Quantum Baseball

The Ye and Rey groups have discovered the strange rules of quantum baseball in which strontium (Sr) atoms are the players, and photons of light are the balls. The balls control the players by not only getting the atoms excited, but also...

Reconstruction

Cong Chen and his colleagues in the Kapteyn/Murnane group have generated one of the most complex coherent light fields ever produced using attosecond (10-18 s) pulses of circularly polarized extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light. (The circularly...

Creative Adventures in Coupling

The Rey and Ye groups are in the midst of an extended collaboration on using the Ye group’s strontium (Sr) lattice clock for studies of spin-orbit coupling in pancake-like layers of cold Sr atoms. Spin-orbit coupling means an atom’s motion...

Back to the Future: The Ultraviolet Surprise

Imagine laser-like x-ray beams that can “see” through materials––all the way into the heart of atoms. Or, envision an exquisitely controlled four-dimensional x-ray microscope that can capture electron motions or watch chemical reactions as...

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