News & Research Highlights

To study nanoscale patterns in tiny electronic or photonic components, a new method based on lensless imaging allows for near-perfect high-resolution microscopy. This is especially important at wavelengths shorter than ultraviolet, which can image with higher spatial resolution than visible light but where image-forming optics are imperfect. 

The most powerful form of lensless imaging is called ptychography, which works by scanning a laser-like beam across a sample, collecting the scattered light, and then using a computer algorithm to reconstruct an image of the sample. 

While ptychography can visualize many nanostructures, this special microscope has trouble analyzing samples with very regular, repeating patterns. This is because the scattered light does not change as a periodic sample is scanned, so the computer algorithm gets confused and cannot reconstruct a good image.

Taking on this challenge, recently graduated Ph.D. researchers Bin Wang and Nathan Brooks, working with JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, developed a novel method that uses short-wavelength light with a special vortex or donut shape to scan these repeating surfaces, resulting in more varied diffraction patterns. This allowed the researchers to capture high-fidelity image reconstructions using this new approach, which they recently published in Optica. This result will also be highlighted in the Optica Magazine Optics and Photonics News in the annual highlights of Optics in 2023. 

Every year, the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) holds a university meeting where students from several of Colorado's prominent universities present their work as a poster to an industry audience, followed by networking with potential employers. For students, it's an excellent opportunity to practice public speaking, share their current research projects, and find potential industry jobs. Each year, three students are awarded a cash prize for how well they communicate their research and the design of their poster. 

This year, JILA graduate students Qizhong Liang, from JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye's research group, and Drew Morrill, from JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane's and Henry Kapteyn's research group, have been awarded prizes for their poster presentations. 

On October 20th, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet visited JILA, a joint institute between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder. During his visit, Bennet engaged with several of the institute's scientists and students, discussing their groundbreaking research and its implications. JILA Fellows Konrad Lehnert, Cindy Regal, Jun Ye, and Ana Maria Rey all spoke about their research during Bennett’s walking tour of JILA. Bennet visited Ye’s laboratory, discussing with several of his students the importance of atomic clocks and their impacts on technology such as GPS. 

 Bennet's engagement with JILA reinforces the significance of Colorado as a hub for scientific innovation and quantum research, and it sheds light on the potential collaborations that could emerge between political leadership and the scientific community.

JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman have both been recently featured in an article for IEEE Spectrum. In a pair of Nature papers, Rey and Kaufman both demonstrated the phenomena of spin-squeezing to reduce noise in their quantum systems. "All objects that follow the rules of quantum physics can exist in multiple energy states at once, an effect known as superposition," explains the IEEE Spectrum article. "Spin squeezing reduces all those possible superposition states to just a few possibilities in some respects, while expanding them in others." 

William Carl Lineberger, 83, loving husband, died on October 17, 2023, in Boulder, Colorado. Born in 1939, in Hamlet, North Carolina, Carl was the only child of Evelyn Pilot Cooper and Caleb Henry Lineberger. He is survived by his wife, Kitty Edwards, and his beloved dog, Jude.

Leading the way in quantum sensing advancements, JILA, a renowned institute at the forefront of quantum sensing research, has once again proven its prowess. In a new Physics Magazine article, JILA graduate student Jarrod Reilly was highlighted in his work developing a groundbreaking approach that promises to redefine the capabilities of quantum sensors.

Opening new possibilities for quantum sensors, atomic clocks and tests of fundamental physics, JILA researchers have developed new ways of “entangling” or interlinking the properties of large numbers of particles. In the process they have devised ways to measure large groups of atoms more accurately even in disruptive, noisy environments. 

The new techniques are described in a pair of papers published in Nature. JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder. 

JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder professor Shuo Sun recently became the science advisor for Boulder-based quantum technology company Icarus Quantum. Since its inception in 2020, Icarus Quantum has focused on developing on-demand single- and entangled-photon generators for the future quantum internet network. As Sun's research focuses on quantum information science using photons (light particles) as a means to transmit information, he will no doubt be a valuable asset to this Colorado start-up. 

The JILA Physics Frontiers Center (PFC), an NSF-funded science center within JILA (a world-leading physics research institute), has recently been awarded a $25 million grant after a re-competition process. 

This science center brings together 20 researchers across JILA to collaborate to realize precise measurements and cutting-edge manipulations to harness increasingly complex quantum systems. Since its establishment in 2006, the JILA PFC’s dedication to advancing quantum research and educating the next generation of scientists has helped it to stand out as the heart of JILA’s excellence. 

JILA and NIST Fellows Jun Ye and Eric Cornell's recent research on advancing electron electric dipole moment (eEDM) measurements has been highlighted in Physics World. 

In a recent Science paper, researchers led by JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye, along with collaborators JILA and NIST Fellow David Nesbitt, scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno, and Harvard University, observed novel ergodicity-breaking in C60, a highly symmetric molecule composed of 60 carbon atoms arranged on the vertices of a “soccer ball” pattern (with 20 hexagon faces and 12 pentagon faces). Their results revealed ergodicity breaking in the rotations of C60. Remarkably, they found that this ergodicity breaking occurs without symmetry breaking and can even turn on and off as the molecule spins faster and faster. Understanding ergodicity breaking can help scientists design better-optimized materials for energy and heat transfer. 

Many everyday systems exhibit “ergodicity” such as heat spreading across a frying pan and smoke filling a room. In other words, matter or energy spreads evenly over time to all system parts as energy conservation allows. On the other hand, understanding how systems can violate (or “break”) ergodicity, such as magnets or superconductors, helps scientists understand and engineer other exotic states of matter.

Around 150 promising inventions are generated annually within the University of Colorado Boulder. To support these inventions, the Venture Partners at CU Boulder organization established the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator, an accelerator program for start-up companies coming out of CU Boulder. This year, Venture Partners at CU Boulder announced the Embark Entrepreneurs in Residence cohort. This cohort pairs entrepreneurs with promising inventions. 

In the case of JILA, entrepreneur Eva Yao will lead FLARI in bringing to market a breathalyzer capable of detecting molecules in breath or air samples invented by Jun Ye for fast detection of diseases and contaminants. 

In a new ACS Nano paper, JILA and NIST Fellow David Nesbitt, along with former graduate student Jacob Pettine and other collaborators, developed a new method for measuring the dynamics of specific particles known as “hot carriers,” as a function of both time and energy, unveiling detailed information that can be used to improve collection efficiencies.

While many researchers within JILA focus on pushing the limits of particles in the quantum realm or learning more about the dynamics of black holes, others, like Rachael Merritt, look at how physics is currently being taught and ways to improve this process. Known as Physics Education Research (PER), this field is crucial in enhancing the quality of physics education by providing evidence-based insights into teaching and learning practices. As a postdoctoral research associate in JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski’s group, Merritt helps to lead some of the most cutting-edge research in PER in the United States.

Metal ions can be found in almost every environment, including wastewater, chemical waste and electronic recycling waste. Properly recovering and recycling valuable metals from various sources is crucial for sustainable resource management and contributes to environmental cleanup. Because of the scarcity of some of these metals, such as rare earth elements or nickel, scientists are working to find ways to remove these ions from the waste and recycle the metals. One method used to remove these metals is to bind them to other molecules known as chelators or chelating agents. Chelators have multiple molecular groups that combine to form binding sites with a natural affinity for binding metal ions, making them a natural choice to extract metals from toxic waste. Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, or EDTA, is a chelator commonly used in metal removal and many other applications, including medicine. “EDTA is used to treat heavy-metal poisoning,” JILA graduate student Lane Terry explained. “So, if you have lead poisoning, you can take EDTA, which binds to the lead and then safely passes through your system. It's also used as a food preservative. So EDTA is everywhere. It's in one of my topical creams, etc.” EDTA is also commonly used in various laboratories, including many within JILA. 

To understand how EDTA binds to these metal ions and water molecules, Madison Foreman, a former JILA graduate student in the Weber group, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Terry, and their supervisor, JILA Fellow J. Mathias Weber, studied the geometry of the EDTA binding site using a unique method that helped to isolate the molecules and their bound ions, allowing for more in-depth analyses of the binding interactions. They published a series of three papers on this topic. In their first paper, published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, they found that the size of the metal ion changes where it sits in the EDTA binding site, which affects other binding interactions, especially with water. 

Colorado 9News recently interviewed JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski as she discussed a recent paper with over 1,000 authors. This recent paper, published in the Astrophysical Journal, focused on solving the mystery of the Sun's corona, a ring of significantly hotter temperatures surrounding the Sun compared to its core. Lewandowski recruited over 1,000 undergraduate students as researchers to study this phenomenon as they analyzed data from observations of the corona. The entire project took multiple years and culminated in over 56,000 hours of research. In the 9News interview, Lewandowski stated: "It's really important for us to understand our Sun because it has a large impact on Earth."

Ana Maria Rey, a JILA and NIST Fellow, has been honored with the prestigious 2023 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the Department of Defense (DOD). The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, named after the visionary American engineer and science administrator, aims to support exceptional researchers with outstanding scientific and technological leadership. It provides recipients substantial financial support over five years, allowing them to pursue innovative and high-impact research endeavors.

Some of the biggest questions about our universe may be solved by scientists using its tiniest particles. Since the 1960s, physicists have been looking at particle interactions to understand an observed imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe. Much of the work has focused on interactions that violate charge and parity (CP) symmetry. This symmetry refers to a lack of change in our universe if all particles’ charges and orientations were inverted. “This charge and parity symmetry is the symmetry that high-energy physicists say needs to be violated to result in this imbalance between matter and antimatter,” explained JILA research associate Luke Caldwell. To try to find evidence of this violation of CP symmetry, JILA and NIST Fellows Jun Ye and Eric Cornell, and their teams, including Caldwell, collaborated to measure the electron electric dipole moment (eEDM), which is often used as a proxy measure for the CP symmetry violation. The eEDM is an asymmetric distortion of the electron’s charge distribution along the axis of its spin. To try to measure this distortion, the researchers used a complex setup of lasers and a novel ion trap. Their results, published in Science as the cover story and Physical Review A, leveraged a longer experiment time to improve the precision measurement by a factor of 2.4, setting new records. 

JILA graduate student Alexander Aeppli is one of a team of researchers working on the world’s most precise clocks. In the laboratory of JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye, Aeppli focuses on improving the strontium atomic clock using powerful ultrastable lasers. “The laser drives an electronic transition in strontium,” Aeppli explained. “And we want to make sure the transition within the strontium is exact.” Before the transition occurs, the strontium atoms are trapped within an optical lattice inside the clock. Once trapped, the strontium atoms can transition when exposed to a particular color (or frequency) of light, and the researchers, like Aeppli, measure this transition frequency as a form of timekeeping. The frequency can then be used as the precise standard of time worldwide.  

JILA's Postdoc Group, an internal organization supporting postdoctoral researchers within JILA, held a career panel titled: "Insights for Applying for Faculty Positions as a Postdoctoral Researcher." The panel featured three JILA Fellows: Margaret Murnane, Shuo Sun, and Graeme Smith, and J. Curtis Beimborn II, the Director of the W.M. Keck Laboratory at JILA, who recently accepted a faculty position on the East Coast.