Research Highlights

The interface between a gas and a solid is a remarkable environment for new investigations. Lots of fascinating chemistry takes place there, including catalysis. Catalysis is acceleration of a chemical reaction that is caused by an element like platinum that remains unchanged by a chemical reaction. For instance platinum catalyzes the transformation of carbon monoxide (CO) into carbon dioxide (CO2) in automobile catalytic converters. A better understanding of catalysis could improve the efficiency of manufacturing important chemicals as well as expanding our fundamental knowledge of chemistry.

The Kapteyn/Murnane group had the idea that it might be possible to produce bright, laser-like beams of x-rays using an ultrafast laser that fits on a small optics table. It was one of those “it probably can’t be done, but we have to try” moments that motivated them to put together a team that includes the Becker theory group, and 16 collaborators in New York, Austria, and Spain. The lead scientist on this effort, Dr. Tenio Popmintchev, was most concerned about the possibility of an explosion, because to generate x-rays at high photon energies, the laser needed to be focused into a fiber containing high-density helium gas at pressures as high as 80 atmospheres. Eighty atmospheres is 80 times the normal air pressure at sea level.

The Nesbitt group has been investigating RNA folding since the early 2000s. The group’s goal has been to gain a detailed understanding of the relationship between structure and function in this important biomolecule. One challenge has been figuring out how unfolded RNA molecules assume the proper three-dimensional (3D) shape to perform their biological activities. To accomplish this, the researchers have shown how biologically active RNA is able to neutralize negative charges that end up in close proximity to each other after folding into a 3D structure.

News Flash!  The Rey group has discovered another good reason for using alkaline-earth atoms, such as strontium (Sr) or Ytterbium (Yb), in experimental quantum simulators. Quantum simulators are systems that mimic interesting materials or mathematical models in a very controlled way. The new reason for using alkaline earth atoms in such systems comes from the fact that their nuclei come in as many as 10 different magnetic flavors, i.e., their spins can be in 10 different quantum states.

In Roman mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, of doors and bridges, as well as endings and time.  The aptly named Janus supercomputer at CU is bringing new opportunities in high-performance research computing to JILA. Since the fall of 2010, JILA groups directed by Andreas Becker, Mitch Begelman, Chris Greene, Ana Maria Rey, and Juri Toomre have used more than 25 million CPU hours on Janus for research in astrophysics and AMO physics.

Fellow Mitch Begelman and his colleagues came up with the idea of quasistars to explain the origin of the supermassive black holes found at the center of most galaxies. According to Begelman, quasistars formed when massive amounts of gas were funneled into the center of protogalaxies. This prodigious amount of gas collapsed directly into black holes without forming stars.

Giant planets form inside a disk of gas and dust orbiting a new star. At first, gravitational interactions between the disk and the planets will keep planetary orbits circular, according to Fellow Phil Armitage. But, once the disk begins to disperse, things get very interesting.

The Thompson group, with theory help from the Holland group, recently demonstrated a superradiant laser that escapes the “echo chamber” problem that limits the best lasers. To understand this problem, imagine an opera singer practicing in an echo chamber. The singer hears his own voice echo from the walls of the room. He constantly adjusts his pitch to match that of his echo from some time before. But, if the walls of the room vibrate, then the singer’s echo will be shifted in pitch after bouncing off of the walls. As a result, if the singer initially started singing an A, he may eventually end up singing a B flat, or a G sharp, or any other random note — spoiling a perfectly good night at the opera.

On Earth, people use enormous linear accelerators and synchrotrons for such purposes as high-energy physics experiments, chemical composition analysis, and drug research. Linear accelerators ramp up the speeds of electrons and other charged subatomic particles close to the speed of light. Synchrotrons also accelerate charged particles (in a circular track) that, when deflected through magnetic fields, create extremely bright high-energy light. 

The Kapteyn/Murnane group and scientists from NIST Boulder and Germany have figured out how the interaction of an ultrafast laser with a metal alloy of iron and nickel destroys the metal’s magnetism. In a recent experiment, the researchers were able to observe how individual bits of quantum mechanical magnetization known as “spin” behaved after the metal was heated with the laser.

The Greene group has just discovered some weird quantum states of ultracold fermions that are also dipoles. Dipoles are particles with small positively and negatively charged ends. Atoms (or molecules) that are fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state — unlike the neighborly bosons that readily occupy the same state and form Bose-Einstein condensates at ultracold temperatures. The new theoretical study was interesting because it explored what would happen to dipolar fermions under the same conditions that cause dipolar bosons to form infinitely many three-atom molecules even though no two bosons ever form a molecule under these conditions!

The Ye group has created the world’s first “ruler of light” in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV). The new ruler is also known more formally as the XUV frequency comb. The comb consists of hundreds of equally spaced “colors” that function in precision measurement like the tics on an ordinary ruler. The amazing thing about this ruler is that XUV colors have such short wavelengths they aren’t even visible to the human eye. The wavelengths of the XUV colors range from about 120 nm to about 50 nm — far shorter than the shortest visible light at 400 nm. “Seeing” the colors in the XUV ruler requires special instruments in the laboratory. With these instruments, the new ruler is opening up whole new vistas of research.

Incredibly sensitive measurements can be made using particles that are correlated in a special way (called entanglement.)  Entanglement is one of the spooky properties of quantum mechanics – two particles interact and retain a connection, even if separated by huge distances.  If you do something to one of the particles, its linked partners will also respond.

We can get valuable information about a material by studying how it responds to light.  But up to now, researchers have been forced to ignore how some of light’s stranger quantum behavior, such as being in a superposition of one or more intensity states, affects these measurements.  New research from the Cundiff group (with newly minted PhD Ryan Smith and graduate student Andy Hunter) has shown that it is possible to back-calculate how a semiconductor responds to light’s quantum features even though we can’t directly create light with those features.

Some stars die dramatically – the light from the supernova explosion of a distant massive star can outshine an entire galaxy. But this event isn’t the endgame for the star — the dense remnants of some of these explosions (called neutron stars) can spit out light rays over thousands of years. 

Theorists Norio Takemoto (now at the Weizmann Institute of Science) and Fellow Andreas Becker figured that something was amiss when they first analyzed the details of what occurs when an ultrafast laser dislodges an electron from a “simple” molecular ion, H₂⁺. Since H₂⁺ has already lost one of its electrons, its two protons only have one electron left to play with.  How hard would it be to “see” what happened to this electron in a strong laser field? After all, a widely accepted theory said that a strong laser field would make it easier for the lone electron to escape when the ion was stretched apart (as opposed to contracted). 

Graduate student Jennifer Lubbeck (Jimenez Group) spent the summer of 2011 doing research in the Molecular Spectroscopy Laboratory at the RIKEN Institute in Wako, Japan (near Tokyo). Her host's group included 16 postdocs and four graduate students. The group was under the direction of Chief Scientist Tahei Tahara. However, Lubbeck actually worked directly with just five other young scientists under the supervision of Professor Kunihiko Ishi (Ishi-san).

The Nesbitt group wants to figure out how chemistry works in outer space. In particular, the group wants to understand the “cosmo”-chemistry leading to the generation of soot, which is similar to products of combustion here on Earth.

The Solar System has a remarkable number of planets. It includes four rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), four giant gaseous planets, and countless smaller worlds. Early on, there may even have been a fifth rocky planet that collided with the Earth, forming the Moon. We owe the survival of so many terrestrial planets (and our own evolution as a species) to the relatively stable orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune during the 100 million years it took to form the inner planets of the Solar System.

Long, long ago galaxies now far away formed around ravenous black holes scattered throughout the Universe. Some 12.5 billion years later, JILA scientist Gayler Harford and Fellow Andrew Hamilton have identified the superhighways that funneled gas into some of the nascent galaxies. These thruways not only routed gas to feed the monster black holes, but also supplied raw materials for the billions and billions of stars that have illuminated those galaxies ever since.