News & Research Highlights

JILA researchers have created a laser-controlled "electron faucet", which emits a stable stream of low-energy electrons. These faucets have many applications for ultrafast switches and ultrafast electron imaging. The electron faucet starts with gold, spherical nanoshells. “They are glass cores with a thin, gold layer over them,” said Jacob Pettine, the graduate student on the project. These nanoshells are truly on the nanoscale, measuring less than 150 nanometers in diameter, which is “something like a thousandth of the size of a human hair,” said Pettine.

“Well, this isn’t going to work.” That was recent JILA graduate Carrie Weidner’s first thought when her advisor, JILA Fellow Dana Anderson, proposed the difficult experiment: to build an interferometer unlike any before – an interferometer of shaking atoms. But the grit paid off, as this compact and robust interferometer outperforms all others in filtering and distinguishing signal direction. While the designs of most atom interferometers are symmetric and elegant, Weidner says the shaken-lattice experiment proposed by Anderson “is more like broken eggs.”

We all know what a tenth of a second feels like. It’s a jiffy, a snap of the fingers, or a camera shutter click. But what does 14 billion years–the age of the universe–feel like? JILA’s atomic clock has the precision to measure the age of the universe to within a tenth of a second. That sort of precision is difficult to intuit. Yet, JILA’s atomic clock, which is the most precise clock in the world, continues to improve its precision. The latest jump in precision, of nearly 50 percent, came about from a new perspective.

JILA Fellow Jun Ye was named the 2018 winner of the I. I. Rabi Award by the IEEE Frequency Control Symposium. Ye was recognized “for the development of stabile, reproducible, and accurate atomic clocks based on optical lattices, and the use of those clocks to probe fundamental atomic interactions and quantum many-body systems.”

Magnets hold cards to your fridge, and store data in your computer. They can power speakers, and produce detailed medical images. And yet, despite millennia of use, and centuries of study, magnetism is still far from fully understood.

The reaction, at first glance, seems simple. Combustion engines, such as those in your car, form carbon monoxide (CO). Sunlight converts atmospheric water into a highly reactive hydroxyl radical (OH). And when CO and OH meet, one byproduct is carbon dioxide (CO₂) ­– a main contributor to air pollution and climate change.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on November 29, 2017 the election of JILA Fellow Jun Ye as a Foreign Member, China’s highest honor for foreign scientists: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) promotes scientific and technological advances across the world. CAS includes a network of more than 100 research and development organizations across the world; three universities; and a traditional merit-based academy analogous to the US National Academy of Sciences to recognize and convene scientific leaders from across the world.

The actors are molecules. The plot, broken molecular bonds. JILA Fellow Ralph Jimenez and a team of detector experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are working together to make X-ray movies of a molecular drama. The team at NIST built a microcalorimeter X-ray spectrometer capable of performing time-resolved spectroscopy; in other words: a camera to film molecules. They use this camera to learn how molecules break their bonds – do the ­electrons rearrange, do the other atoms quake?

Why are we here? This is an age-old philosophical question. However, physicists like Will Cairncross, Dan Gresh and their advisors Eric Cornell and Jun Ye actually want to figure out out why people like us exist at all. If there had been the same amount of matter and antimatter created in the Big Bang, the future of stars, galaxies, our Solar System, and life would have disappeared in a flash of light as matter and antimatter recombined.

Imagine A Future . . . The International Moon Station team is busy on the Moon’s surface using sensitive detectors of gravity and magnetic and electric fields looking for underground water-rich materials, iron-containing ores, and other raw materials required for building a year-round Moon station. The station’s mission: launching colonists and supplies to Mars for colonization. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Americans are under simultaneous assault by three Category 5 hurricanes, one in the Gulf of Mexico and two others threatening the Caribbean islands. Hundreds of people are stranded in the rising waters, but thanks precision cell-phone location services and robust cell-tower connections in high wind, their rescuers are able to accurately pinpoint their locations and send help immediately.

Newly minted JILA Ph.D. Catherine Klauss and her colleagues in the Jin and Cornell group decided to see what would happen to a Bose-Einstein condensate of Rubidium-85 (⁸⁵Rb) atoms if they suddenly threw the whole experiment wildly out of equilibrium by quickly lowering the magnetic field through a Feshbach resonance.

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 converted propagating qubits (encoded as superpositions1 of zero and one microwave photons) into the motion of a tiny aluminum drum. The successful conversion is considered a key step in using a mechanical drum to (1) transfer quantum information between microwave and optical frequencies or (2) store quantum information inside a quantum computer.

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 small molecules, which are the most complex quantum systems that can currently be completely understood from the principles of quantum mechanics, will allow researchers to probe the quantum interactions of individual molecules with other molecules, investigate what happens to molecules during collisions, and study how molecules behave in chemical reactions. 

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 a low-noise message to a cell phone tower,¹ and from there––well to outer space (which is a problem that's much, much harder to solve than cell phone to cell phone tower transmissions).

Fellow Tom Perkins has won a 2017 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research. Perkins will receive the award from Governor John Hickenlooper at an event sponsored by the CO-LABS consortium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on October 5, 2017. This year’s ninth annual event will honor Colorado’s top scientists and engineers for projects having a significant impact on society.

Ana Maria Rey has been appointed a NIST Fellow as of August 21,2017 by the Acting Director of NIST. JILA is a research and training partnership between the University of Colorado and NIST, and Ana Maria is one of the several JILA Fellows who are NIST employees. Ana Maria was named a NIST Fellow in recognition of her world-leading program in quantum theory, her pioneering work in quantum many-body physics, and her continuing powerful collaborations with experimentalists at JILA, at NIST, and across the world.

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 measurements of biomolecules by orders of magnitude for stability, sensitivity and time response, the Perkins group has now developed ways to make these precision biomechanical measurements up to 100 times faster than previously possible––obtaining useful information in hours to days rather than weeks to months. 

Leah Dodson won the Miller Prize at the 72nd International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, held June 19–23 in Urbana, Illinois. Dodson is an NRC postdoc whose official advisor is Jun Ye, but who primarily works on molecular spectroscopy in the Mathias Weber lab. Her award-winning talk was entitled “Oxalate Formation in Titanium––Carbon Dioxide Anionic Clusters Studied by Infrared Photodissociation Spectroscopy.”

Bryce Bjork’s talk entitled “Direct Measurement of OD+CO-> cis-DOCO, trans-DOCO, and D+CO₂ Branching Kinetics using Time-Resolved Frequency Comb Spectroscopy” was selected by a panel of judges at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy as one of three winners of the 2017 Rao Prize. The prize will be presented to Bjork at the June 2018 Symposium.