News & Research Highlights

Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman is awarded a grant from the 2023 Young Investigator Research Program
Published: December 14, 2022

JILA Fellow, NIST Physicist, and University of Colorado Physics professor Adam Kaufman has been awarded a grant as part of the 2023 Young Investigator Research Program, or YIP. YIP was launched by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, the basic research arm of the Air Force Research Laboratory. The AFOSR's mission is to support Air Force goals of control and maximum utilization of air, space, and cyberspace. To do this, AFSOR is awarding $25 million in grants to 58 scientists and engineers from 44 research institutions and businesses in 22 states in 2023. 

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Investigators: Adam Kaufman
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA Graduate Student Aaron Young is Awarded a 2022 University of Chicago Quantum Creators Prize
Published: November 30, 2022

JILA graduate student Aaron Young, a researcher in JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman’s laboratory has been awarded a 2022 University of Chicago Quantum Creators Prize. The prize is part of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, one of the largest organizations celebrating quantum research and computing in the U.S. As Young explained: “This award is relatively new, this is only the second year it's been around, but I think it does a good job of providing some visibility to junior people in the field - particularly to people outside the academic community like those in industry or in government.” To promote early career research and diversity within the field of quantum science, award winners receive an honorarium of $500, a prize certificate, and reimbursed travel to the 2022 Chicago Quantum Summit. 

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Investigators: Adam Kaufman
Atomic & Molecular Physics | Laser Physics
JILA Fellow Andreas Becker is awarded an Optica Fellowship
Published: November 09, 2022

JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor Andreas Becker has been awarded a 2023 fellowship to Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). Becker's work at JILA focuses on the analysis and simulation of ultrafast phenomena in atoms, molecules, and clusters, in particular attosecond electron dynamics, coherent control, and molecular imaging. Using special laser frequencies, Becker and his team are able to study the dynamics of these atoms and molecules in different time scales. 

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Investigators: Andreas Becker
Atomic & Molecular Physics | Laser Physics
JILA Fellow Margaret Murnane wins the 2022 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize
Published: October 24, 2022

JILA Fellow Margaret Murnane has been selected as a recipient of the 2022 Institute of Physics Isaac Newton Medal and Prize. This prestigious award honors the legacy of the famous physicist Sir Isaac Newton, by commending those who have made world-leading contributions in the field of physics. Murnane received the award for pioneering and sustained contributions to the development of ultrafast lasers and coherent X-ray sources and the use of such sources to understand the quantum nature of materials.

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Investigators: Margaret Murnane
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
An Entangled Matter-wave Interferometer: Now with Double the Spookiness!
Published: October 20, 2022

JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson’s team of researchers have for the first time successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor:  entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms.  Einstein originally referred to entanglement as creating spooky action at a distance—the strange effect of quantum mechanics in which what happens to one atom somehow influences another atom somewhere else. Entanglement is at the heart of hoped-for quantum computers, quantum simulators and quantum sensors.  A second rather spooky aspect of quantum mechanics is delocalization, the fact that a single atom can be in more than one place at the same time.  As described in their paper recently published in Nature, the Thompson group has combined the spookiness of both entanglement and delocalization to realize a matter-wave interferometer that can sense accelerations with a precision that surpasses the standard quantum limit (a limit on the accuracy of an experimental measurement at a quantum level) for the first time.  By doubling down on the spookiness, future quantum sensors will be able to provide more precise navigation, explore for needed natural resources, more precisely determine fundamental constants such as the fine structure and gravitational constants, look more precisely for dark matter, or maybe even one day detect gravitational waves.

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Related Publications: Entanglement-Enhanced Matter-Wave Interferometry in a High-Finesse CavityInvestigators: James Thompson
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
Humans of JILA: Dhruv Kedar
Published: October 17, 2022

Walk down to the basement labs of JILA and you're sure to find something interesting. From atomic clocks to biophysics, researchers are hard at work advancing scientific and technological frontiers. One of these researchers is graduate student Dhruv Kedar. Kedar works in JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye's lab, focusing on laser development for a range of applications including optical atomic clocks and optical timescales. “We're really just trying to make the world's best lasers as part of the atomic clock,” explained Kedar. “We do a good job of isolating out any sort of environmental effects so the atomic frequency of the clock doesn't change but gets more precise.” As optical atomic clocks use a series of lasers to control and measure the quantum state evolution inside an atom, which will redefine the SI unit of Second in the foreseeable future, improving the lasers to be themselves free of environmental noise is an important task. 

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Investigators: Jun Ye
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey Featured in Quantum Systems Accelerator Article
Published: October 16, 2022

How does a scientist become interested in quantum physics? For Ana Maria Rey, both a JILA and NIST Fellow, the answer involves a rich and complicated journey. Quantum Systems Accelerator, a National QIS Research Center funded by the United States Department of Energy Office of Science, featured Rey in a new article series in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. In this article, Rey shares her story and her current research. 

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Investigators: Ana Maria Rey
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
A Magic Balance in Optical Lattice Clocks
Published: October 12, 2022

Atomic clocks are essential in building a precise time standard for the world, which is a big focus for researchers at JILA. JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye, in particular, has studied atomic clocks for two decades, looking into ways to increase their sensitivity and accuracy. In a new paper published in Science Advances, Ye and his team collaborated with JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and her team to engineer a new design of clock, which demonstrated better theoretical understanding and experimental control of atomic interactions, leading to a breakthrough in the precision achievable in state-of-the-art optical atomic clocks.

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Related Publications: Hamiltonian engineering of spin-orbit coupled fermions in a Wannier-Stark optical lattice clockInvestigators: Ana Maria Rey | Jun Ye
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman is awarded the 2023 I.I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Published: October 11, 2022

Adam Kaufman — a JILA Fellow, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Physicist, and University of Colorado Boulder Professor — has been awarded the American Physical Society's (APS) 2023 I.I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics. 

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Investigators: Adam Kaufman
Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA and NIST Fellow Adam Kaufman Wins Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize
Published: September 22, 2022

Boulder, Colo. — Physicist Adam Kaufman of both JILA and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been awarded the 2023 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation for his work in advancing the control of atoms and molecules to improve atomic clocks and quantum information processing. 

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Investigators: Adam Kaufman
Atomic & Molecular Physics | Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey Featured in "Optica Community" Piece
Published: September 22, 2022

How a woman from Colombia overcame obstacles to become a leading theoretical physicist and develop the world’s most accurate atomic clock. -From the "Optica Community" article

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Investigators: Ana Maria Rey
Quantum Information Science & Technology
Clearing Quantum Traffic Jams under the SU(n) of Symmetric Collisions
Published: September 15, 2022

Of all the atoms that quantum physicists study, alkaline atoms hold a special place due to their unique structure. Found in the second column of the periodic table, these atoms have two outer electrons, allowing the atoms to interact with one another in intriguing ways. “They have received a lot of attention in recent years among the physics community because of two reasons,” explained JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey. “One is that they have a unique atomic structure, which makes them ideal for atomic clocks. This is because they have a long-lived electronic excited state that can live longer than 100 seconds. The second is that their electronic and nuclear spin degrees of freedom are highly decoupled and therefore the nuclear spins do not participate in the atomic collisions.”

Like planets orbiting the sun while rotating, an atom's electrons orbit the nucleus while spinning. The nucleus itself also spins, and this spin can be linked, or “coupled” to the electrons' spins. If the nuclear spin is coupled, it (indirectly) participates in collisions with other atoms. If it is not coupled (decoupled), the nuclear spin is uninvolved in these collisions. For decoupled nuclei, their properties give rise to a unique symmetry called SU(n) symmetry, where the strength of the interactions between the atoms is uninfluenced by what nuclear spins are involved in the collisions. “Here n corresponds to the number of nuclear spin states,” Rey added. “In an alkaline earth atom like strontium, it can be up to 10.” In a new paper published in PRX Quantum, Rey and her team of researchers proposed a new method for seeing the quantum effects enabled by SU(n) symmetry in current experimental conditions, something that has been historically challenging for physicists.

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Related Publications: Resonant Dynamics of Strongly Interacting SU(n) Fermionic Atoms in a Synthetic Flux LadderInvestigators: Ana Maria Rey
Quantum Information Science & Technology
Seeing Quantum Weirdness: Superposition, Entanglement, and Tunneling
Published: August 19, 2022

Quantum science promises a range of technological breakthroughs, such as quantum computers that can help discover new pharmaceuticals or quantum sensors for navigation. These capabilities rest on two unusual properties of quantum systems, superposition and entanglement. Just as a computer register stores information in the zeros or ones of classical bits, quantum bits, or qubits, store quantum information—but in the quantum world, superposition allows the qubit to be both a zero and a one at the same time. Furthermore, multiple qubits can be bizarrely correlated through a process called entanglement. When two qubits are entangled with each other, each qubit individually looks to be in a random state, but measuring one qubit reveals perfect information about its entangled partner. These properties of superposition and entanglement make qubits quite special, as they can work more efficiently than a classical computer’s bits.

However, a common challenge in actually using these quantum systems arises due to their limited memory time, or “coherence” time, which is often measured in milliseconds. Many researchers at JILA study and use superposition and entanglement of quantum systems, including JILA fellow Adam Kaufman. Previously, Kaufman and his research team focused on improving the coherence time of the strontium atoms’ superposition between the ground state and the “clock” state, so named because these two states form the basis for state-of-the-art atomic clocks. As reported in two new papers, researchers from this lab have extended these studies to much larger system sizes, with an atom in a superposition of hundreds of locations, and separately, demonstrating optical clock entanglement with seconds-scale coherence time.

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Related Publications: Ytterbium Nuclear-Spin Qubits in an Optical Tweezer ArrayInvestigators: Adam Kaufman
Atomic & Molecular Physics | Precision Measurement
Creating A Two-Step Dance for Lasers
Published: August 17, 2022

Lasers have not only fascinated scientists for decades, but they have also become an integral part of many electronic devices. To create scientific-grade lasers, physicists try to control the temporal, spatial, phase, and polarization properties of the laser beam’s pulse to be able to manipulate it. One of these properties is called the orbital angular momentum (OAM), and its phase, or shape, swirls as the doughnut-shaped laser beam travels through space. There are two types of OAM, spatial (S-OAM) and spatial-temporal (ST-OAM). S-OAM describes the angular momentum of the laser beam that is parallel to the light source's propagation direction. In contrast, ST-OAM has angular momentum that moves in a motion perpendicular to the light source’s  propagation direction, which creates a time component to the momentum  [1, 2].  Because of these differences, ST-OAM is more difficult to study due to this time component. According to senior scientist Dr. Chen-Ting Liao: “The problem is that ST-OAM is very difficult to see or measure. And if we can't see or measure this easily, there's no way we can fully understand and optimize it, let alone use it for potential future applications.” To try to overcome this difficulty, a collaboration led by Dr. Liao and other researchers, including JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, worked out a method to image and better analyze ST-OAM beams. Their work was subsequently published in ACS Photonics and featured on the cover [3].

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Related Publications: Second harmonic generation from the Si/SiO2 interfaceInvestigators: Margaret Murnane | Henry Kapteyn
Atomic & Molecular Physics | Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
JILA and NIST Researchers Develop Miniature Lens for Trapping Atoms
Published: August 01, 2022

JILA Fellow Cindy Regal and her team, along with researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have for the first time demonstrated that they can trap single atoms using a novel miniaturized version of “optical tweezers” — a system that grabs atoms using a laser beam as chopsticks.

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Related Publications: NIST Researchers Develop Miniature Lens for Trapping AtomsInvestigators: Cindy Regal
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
Jun Ye is awarded the Department of Defense 2022 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship
Published: July 13, 2022

The DoD announced today the selection of nine distinguished faculty scientists and engineers for the 2022 Class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows (VBFF). This highly competitive Fellowship is named in honor of Dr. Vannevar Bush, who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development after World War II. In line with Dr. Bush’s vision, the Fellowship aims to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research.

“The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship is the Department’s most prestigious research grant award,” said Dr. Jean-Luc Cambier, the VBFF Program Director. “It is oriented towards bold and ambitious ‘blue sky’ research that will lead to extraordinary outcomes that may revolutionize entire disciplines, create entirely new fields, or disrupt accepted theories and perspectives.” JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye has been distinguished as one of the 2022 Fellows. 

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Investigators: Jun Ye
Astrophysics | Atomic & Molecular Physics | Biophysics
Celebrating 60 Years of JILA
Published: July 12, 2022

This year, JILA celebrates its 60th anniversary. Officially established on April 13, 1962, as a joint institution between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), JILA has become a world leader in physics research. Its rich history includes three Nobel laureates, groundbreaking work in laser development, atomic clocks, underlying dedication to precision measurement, and even competitive sports leagues. The process of creating this science goliath was not always straightforward and took the dedication and hard work of many individuals.

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Investigators: John Hall | Judah Levine | Carl Wieman | Eric Cornell | Margaret Murnane | Henry Kapteyn | Jun Ye | Thomas Perkins | W. Carl Lineberger
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
Connecting Microwave and Optical Frequencies through the Ground State of a Micromechanical Object
Published: June 23, 2022

The process of developing a quantum computer has seen significant progress in the past 20 years. Quantum computers are designed to solve complex problems using the intricacies of quantum mechanics. These computers can also communicate with each other by using entangled photons (photons that have connected quantum states). As a result of this entanglement, quantum communication can provide a more secure form of communication, and has been seen as a promising method for the future of a more private and faster internet.

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Related Publications: Optomechanical Ground-State Cooling in a Continuous and Efficient Electro-Optic Transducer
Superconducting-qubit readout via low-backaction electro-optic transduction
Investigators: Cindy Regal | Konrad Lehnert
Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
New Research Reveals A More Robust Qubit System, even with a Stronger Laser Light
Published: June 15, 2022

Qubits are a basic building block for quantum computers, but they’re also notoriously fragile—tricky to observe without erasing their information in the process. Now, new research from CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) may be a leap forward for handling qubits with a light touch.  

In the study, a team of physicists demonstrated that it could read out the signals from a type of qubit called a superconducting qubit using laser light—and without destroying the qubit at the same time.

Artist's depiction of an electro-optic transducer, an ultra-thin wafer that can read out the information from a superconducting qubit.

Artist's depiction of an electro-optic transducer, an ultra-thin device that can capture and transform the signals coming from a superconducting qubit. (Credit: Steven Burrows/JILA)

The group’s results could be a major step toward building a quantum internet, the researchers say. Such a network would link up dozens or even hundreds of quantum chips, allowing engineers to solve problems that are beyond the reach of even the fastest supercomputers around today. They could also, theoretically, use a similar set of tools to send unbreakable codes over long distances. 

The study, published June 15 in the journal Nature, was led by JILA, a joint research institute between CU Boulder and NIST.

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Related Publications: Superconducting-qubit readout via low-backaction electro-optic transductionInvestigators: Cindy Regal | Konrad Lehnert
Atomic & Molecular Physics | Precision Measurement | Quantum Information Science & Technology
The University of Colorado's President Saliman Visits JILA
Published: May 23, 2022

University of Colorado President Todd Saliman visited JILA this past week and toured the laboratories at the invitation of JILA and NIST Fellow Eric Cornell.

Saliman was impressed by the research team and Fellows and applauded their work.

 

“You are all working to change the world,” President Saliman said.

 

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Investigators: Eric Cornell