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.

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...

The Electron Stops When The Bands Play On

The Kapteyn-Murnane group has come up with a novel way to use fast bursts of extreme ultraviolet light to capture how strongly electrons interact with each other in materials. This research is important for figuring out how quickly...

The Ties That Bind

JILA and NIST scientists are hot on the trail of understanding quantum correlations (or entanglement) among groups of quantum particles such as atoms or ions. Such particles are the building blocks of larger and larger chunks of matter...

The Chameleon Interferometer

The Regal group recently met the challenge of measurements in an extreme situation with a device called an interferometer. The researchers succeeded by using creative alterations to the device itself and quantum correlations. Quantum...

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