News & Research Highlights

Imagine a network of multiple clocks orbiting the Earth, not only reporting down to us, but also collaborating quantum mechanically among themselves to operate precisely in sync as a single global superclock, or world clock. The world clock is delivering the most precise timekeeping in all of human history—to every member nation regardless of politics, alliances, or behavior on the ground. Moreover, the world clock itself is virtually immune to sabotage and can peer under the surface of the Earth to uncover its detailed composition or out into space to reveal a better understanding of fundamental physical principles such as quantum mechanics and gravity. 

Mid-infrared (mid-IR) laser light is accomplishing some remarkable things at JILA. This relatively long-wavelength light (2–4 µm), when used to drive a process called high-harmonic generation, can produce bright beams of soft x-rays with all their punch packed into isolated ultrashort bursts. And, all this takes place in a tabletop-size apparatus. The soft x-rays bursts have pulse durations measured in tens to hundreds of attoseconds (10^-18 s).

Biomolecules may not always behave the same way in test tubes as they do in living cells, a fact underscored by important new work by former research associate Nick Dupuis, graduate student Erik Holmstrom, and Fellow David Nesbitt. The researchers found that under crowded conditions that begin to mimic those found in cells, single RNA molecules folded 35 times faster than in the dilute solutions typically used in test-tube experiments.

Fellow Tom Perkins’ group is significantly closer to realizing its long-standing dream of using atomic force microscopy (AFM) to study how membrane proteins fold and unfold. Historically, scientists have used AFM to measure the mechanical forces needed to unfold individual proteins and the resulting increase in their lengths. However, the limitations of AFM itself have prevented researchers from watching the unfolding process in detail.

Graduate student Erik Holmstrom and Fellow David Nesbitt have applied their laboratory research on the rates of RNA folding and unfolding to the medically important enzyme telomerase. Telomerase employs both protein and RNA components to lengthen chromosomes, which are shortened every time they are copied.

The Regal-Lehnert collaboration has just taken a significant step towards the goal of one day building a quantum information network. Large-scale fiber-optic networks capable of preserving fragile quantum states (which encode information) will be necessary to realize the benefits of superfast quantum computing.

There’s exciting news from JILA’s ultracold molecule collaboration. The Jin, Ye, Holland, and Rey groups have come up with new theory (verified by experiment) that explains the suppression of chemical reactions between potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules in the KRb quantum simulator. The main reason the molecules do not collide and react is continuous measurement of molecule loss from the simulator.

When Andy Almand-Hunter and his colleagues in the Cundiff group shined a laser on a sample of gallium arsenide (GaAs), the last thing they were expecting to create was a fog of liquid-like quantum droplets, which the group named "dropletons." Dropletons are a new, stable form of matter much like an ordinary liquid—with one key difference.

The groups of Fellow Adjoint Markus Raschke and Fellow Tom Perkins joined forces recently to shine light onto a bacterial membrane protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR). They used a new infrared (IR) light imaging system with a spatial resolution and chemical sensitivity of just a few bR molecules. In their experiment, the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) acted like an antenna for the IR light, focusing it onto the sample.

JILA and NIST labs are well on the way to creating astonishingly accurate optical atomic clocks based on the neutral atoms strontium (Sr) and ytterbium (Yb). The new technologies are already capable of the most meticulous timekeeping in human history.

Capturing and controlling the fleeting dance of electrons as they rearrange during a chemical reaction has been a long-standing challenge in science for several decades. Since electrons are much lighter than atoms, they can respond almost instantaneously – on time scales of hundreds of attoseconds, where an attosecond is 10^-18 s.

The Cornell and Jin groups have just met the challenge of creating and studying an extremely strongly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). This feat was reported in Nature Physics online January 12, 2014. An example of an ordinary weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a quantum gas of rubidium atoms (⁸⁵Rb) all piled up in a little ball whose temperature is a chilly 10 nK.

President Barack Obama has named Ana Maria Rey as one of 102 recipients of the 2013 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers. Rey will receive her award at a Washington, DC ceremony in 2014.

Physicists wonder about some pretty strange things. For instance, one burning question is: How round is the electron? While the simplest picture of the electron is a perfect sphere, it is possible that it is instead shaped like an egg. The egg shape would look a bit like a tiny separation of positive and negative charges. Physicists call this kind of charge separation an electric dipole moment, or EDM. The existence of an EDM in the electron or any other subatomic particle will have a profound impact on our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics. 

Research associate Tom Purdy and his colleagues in the Regal group have just built an even better miniature light-powered machine that can now strip away noise from a laser beam. Their secret: a creative workaround of a quantum limit imposed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This limit makes it impossible to simultaneously reduce the noise on both the amplitude and phase of light inside interferometers and other high-tech instruments that detect miniscule position changes.

Ana Maria Rey of JILA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has won the 2014 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award of the American Physical Society. Rey is one of the world’s top young theoretical physicists. Her specialty is atomic, molecular, and optical physics, an area in which she has shown a remarkable talent for suggesting practical applications of her theory to key experiments. Her hallmark collaborations at JILA and NIST include the fields of ultracold molecules, neutral-atom optical lattice atomic clocks, and quantum simulations. In addition to groundbreaking work at NIST and JILA, Rey collaborates with leading scientists around the world.

Research associate Bo Yan and his colleagues recently observed spin exchanges in ultracold potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules inside an optical lattice (a crystal of light formed by interacting laser beams). In solid materials, such spin exchanges are the building blocks of advanced materials and exotic behavior.

Because quantum mechanics is crucial to understanding the behavior of everything in the Universe, one can understand key elements of the behavior of a neutron star by investigating the behavior of an atomic system in the laboratory. This is the promise of the new quantum simulator in the Ye labs. It is a fully controllable quantum system that is being used as a laboratory to study the behavior of other less controllable and more poorly understood quantum systems.

Theorist Ana Maria Rey has been given the 2013 “Great Minds in STEM” Most Promising Scientist Award. The honor is also known as the HENAAC (Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference) Award.

In the future, quantum microwave networks may handle quantum information transfer via optical fibers or microwave cables. The evolution of a quantum microwave network will rely on innovative microwave circuits currently being developed and characterized by the Lehnert group. Applications for this innovative technology could one day include quantum computing, converters that transform microwave signals to optical light while preserving any encoded quantum information, and advanced quantum electronics devices.