News & Research Highlights

Jun Ye's research group has developed a groundbreaking laser system with record-breaking stability, crucial for advancing quantum technologies. By combining a highly stable silicon cavity laser with a frequency comb and a secondary cavity tuned for strontium atoms, the researchers created a laser capable of manipulating quantum states with unprecedented precision. Their system significantly reduces frequency noise, a major hurdle in quantum experiments, and demonstrated its effectiveness by achieving a new fidelity record in quantum gate operations on 3000 neutral atom qubits. This innovation paves the way for more accurate atomic clocks and scalable quantum computing.

JILA is proud to announce that Chuankun Zhang, a former graduate student in CU Boulder Physics professor and JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye’s research group, has been named a recipient of the prestigious 2025 Boeing Quantum Creators Prize. This national honor recognizes early-career researchers whose work is propelling quantum science and engineering in bold new directions.

In a groundbreaking study researchers at JILA have demonstrated continuous lasing and strong atom-cavity coupling using laser-cooled strontium atoms. This innovative experiment opens new avenues for precision measurement and quantum technologies, promising advancements in quantum sensing and metrology.

JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Jun Ye has been awarded a prestigious 2025 AB Nexus seed grant for his pioneering work in quantum sensing technologies. 

In a new theoretical study, physicists at JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder have proposed a way to make the most precise clocks in the world even more robust—by weaving in the strange, protective properties of topological physics. Their work, recently accepted for publication in PRX Quantum, explores how a class of quantum states known as symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases could be used to improve the performance of optical lattice clocks, a cornerstone of modern precision measurement.

The first Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) was first created by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, Mike Anderson, Jason Ensher, and Michael Matthews on June 5, 1995 in JILA at the University of Colorado Boulder. This new state of matter was first predicted 70 years earlier. Satyendra Nath Bose first described the quantum statistics of what we now call bosons, and Albert Einstein extended the theory to show that non-interacting bosons could condense into a single macroscopic quantum state at low temperature. 

In a new study, physicists at JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder have used a cloud of atoms chilled down to incredibly cold temperatures to simultaneously measure acceleration in three dimensions—a feat that many scientists didn’t think was possible.

In a recent study published in Science, by JILA and NIST Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder physics professors Jun Ye and Ana Maria Rey, interactions between atoms are explored in depth, focusing on superexchange processes that occur in a three-dimensional optical lattice.

Professor Cindy Regal, Baur-SPIE Chair at JILA, has been named a 2025 Brown Investigator by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech.

In a thrilling display of scientific communication and creativity, Thi Hoang, a graduate student at JILA, emerged victorious at the inaugural Quantum Science Slam held during the CLEO 2025 conference. This new event, designed to bring cutting-edge science to life for a broader audience, saw participants deliver engaging and entertaining 10-minute presentations on their research.

The strange behaviors of high-temperature superconductors—materials that conduct electricity without resistance above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen—and other systems with unusual magnetic properties have fascinated scientists for decades. While researchers have developed mathematical models for these systems, much of the underlying quantum dynamics and phases remain a mystery because of the immense computational difficulty of solving these models.

In a new study published in Science, researchers from JILA, led by JILA and NIST Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder physics professors Jun Ye and Ana Maria Rey and JILA and CU Boulder physics professor John Bohn, used ultracold molecules to realize these models with an unprecedented level of control. Their work bridges the fields of atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics with condensed matter physics, opening new doors for quantum simulations and advances in quantum technologies.

“It is very exciting that experiments with polar molecules are now reaching the point where these models can be implemented in the lab,” Rey says. “While currently, we are exploring dynamics at low filling fractions where theory effort can still have some predicting capabilities, very soon experiments will reach dense regimes intractable by theory, fulfilling the dream of quantum simulation.” 

Jun Ye, a distinguished Fellow at JILA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a physics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been honored with the 2025 Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis. 

Researchers at JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder have developed an innovative platform that combines machine learning with atom interferometry to create a universal quantum sensor. This system uses programmable atom-optic "gates" to reconfigure a single device via software for various precision measurements, such as acceleration, rotation, and gravity gradients, without the need for hardware changes. By integrating machine learning, the team optimized the design of these gates, achieving high-fidelity quantum state transformations with over 90% accuracy. This versatile platform allows for adaptive, intelligent quantum metrology, capable of switching functions through software updates. The research, part of NASA's Quantum Pathways Institute, aims to develop deployable quantum sensors for space missions, marking a significant advancement in quantum sensing and potentially bringing quantum technologies into everyday applications.

Researchers at JILA, led by Ana Maria Rey, developed a new protocol for teleporting quantum information in collective spin states of ions within a two-dimensional crystal. This involves entangling ion groups through phonon modes and using measurements to transfer quantum states. The protocol, successfully simulated with up to 300 ions, shows potential for quantum networks and distributed quantum sensing.

Understanding how molecules interact with ions is a cornerstone of chemistry, with applications from pollution detection and cleanup to drug delivery. In a series of new studies led by JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder chemistry professor Mathias Weber, researchers explored how a specific ion receptor called octamethyl calix[4]pyrrole (omC4P) binds to different anions, such as fluoride or nitrate. These findings, published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, and The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, provide fundamental insights about molecular binding that could help advance fields such as environmental science and synthetic chemistry. 

“The main issue with understanding these interactions is that there is a competition between an ion binding to a certain receptor and that same ion wanting to be surrounded by solvent molecules,” Weber explains. “This competition impacts how effective and specific an ion receptor can be, and we currently don’t understand it sufficiently well to design better ion receptors for applications. This has been a problem for decades, and we can now try to solve it by taking a different perspective.”
 

Dr. Olivia Krohn, a former JILA graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories, has been awarded the prestigious Justin Jankunas dissertation award, given out by the American Physical Society (APS) division of chemical physics at the APS Global Summit conference. This award recognizes exceptional doctoral research that advances the frontiers of physics. Krohn’s award highlights her dissertation research, which bridges the legacy of JILA’s origins in astrophysics with its current role as a global leader in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics.

For decades, atomic clocks have been the pinnacle of precision timekeeping, enabling GPS navigation, cutting-edge physics research, and tests of fundamental theories. But researchers at JILA, led by JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Jun Ye, in collaboration with the Technical University of Vienna, are pushing beyond atomic transitions to something potentially even more stable: a nuclear clock. This clock could revolutionize timekeeping by using a uniquely low-energy transition within the nucleus of a thorium-229 atom. This transition is less sensitive to environmental disturbances than modern atomic clocks and has been proposed for tests of fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model.

This idea isn’t new in Ye’s laboratory. In fact, work in the lab on nuclear clocks began with a landmark experiment, the results of which were published as the cover article of Nature last year, where the team made the first frequency-based, quantum-state-resolved measurement of the thorium-229 nuclear transition in a thorium-doped host crystal. This achievement confirmed that thorium’s nuclear transition could be measured with enough precision to be used as a timekeeping reference. 

However, to build a precise clock, researchers must fully characterize how the transition responds to external conditions, including temperature. That’s where this new investigation—an “Editor’s Choice” paper published in Physical Review Letters—comes in, as the team studied the energy shifts in the thorium nuclei as the crystal containing the atoms was heated to different temperatures. 

​A team of physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a groundbreaking laser-based device capable of analyzing gas samples to identify a vast array of molecules at extremely low concentrations, down to parts per trillion. Their findings were recently published in Nature. 

For over a century, physicists have grappled with one of the most profound questions in science: How do the rules of quantum mechanics, which govern the smallest particles, fit with the laws of general relativity, which describe the universe on the largest scales? 

The optical lattice clock, one of the most precise timekeeping devices, is becoming a powerful tool used to tackle this great challenge. Within an optical lattice clock, atoms are trapped in a “lattice” potential formed by laser beams and are manipulated with precise control of quantum coherence and interactions governed by quantum mechanics. Simultaneously, according to Einstein’s laws of general relativity, time moves slower in stronger gravitational fields. This effect, known as gravitational redshift, leads to a tiny shift of atoms’ internal energy levels depending on their position in gravitational fields, causing their “ticking”—the oscillations that define time in optical lattice clocks—to change. 

By measuring the tiny shifts of oscillation frequency in these ultra precise clocks, researchers are able to explore the influences of Einstein’s theory of relativity on quantum systems. While relativistic effects are well-understood for individual atoms, their role in many-body quantum systems, where atoms can interact and become entangled, remains largely unexplored.

Making a step forward in this direction, researchers led by JILA and NIST Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder physics professors Jun Ye and Ana Maria Rey—in collaboration with scientists at the Leibnitz University in Hanover, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Innsbruck—proposed practical protocols to explore the effects of relativity, such as the gravitational redshift, on quantum entanglement and interactions in an optical atomic clock. Their work revealed that the interplay between gravitational effects and quantum interactions can lead to unexpected phenomena, such as atomic synchronization and quantum entanglement among particles. The results of this study were published in Physical Review Letters.

When atoms collide, their exact structure—for example, the number of electrons they have or even the quantum spin of their nuclei—has a lot to say about how they bounce off each other. This is especially true for atoms cooled to near-zero Kelvin, where quantum mechanical effects give rise to unexpected phenomena.  Collisions of these cold atoms can sometimes be caused by incoming laser light, resulting in the colliding atom-pair forming a short-lived molecular state before disassociating and releasing an enormous amount of energy. These so-called light-assisted collisions, which can happen very quickly, impact a broad range of quantum science applications, yet many details of the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. 

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Cindy Regal, along with former JILA Associate Fellow Jose D’Incao (currently an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston) and their teams developed new experimental and theoretical techniques for studying the rates at which light-assisted collisions occur in the presence of small atomic energy splittings.  Their results rely upon optical tweezers—focused lasers capable of trapping individual atoms—that the team used to isolate and study the products of individual pairs of atoms.