Research Highlights

Using optical tweezers, the Kaufman and Ye groups at JILA have achieved record coherence times, an important advance for optical clocks and quantum computing.

Quantum drums can get around distracting noise with a new measurement technique—one that perfectly demonstrates the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Atoms could live in their excited states forever by reaching a dark state.

New research from the Cornell Group suggests that the van der Waals universality may have limitations.

How do you hear--and study--the quietest sound in the universe? With a special microphone and speaker. 

An advance from the Raschke group could free quantum technology from ultra-cold temperatures.

Using Feshbach resonance, physicists have found that they can control a dynamical phase transition in an out-of-equilibrium state. 

It's hard to read a clock with hands that wobble. The Ye Group has found a way to steady their optical atomic clock using a new cavity.

While we've known for a while that black holes could rip stars apart, we don’t know why these events occur so frequently. Now, a model by JILA researchers explaining this discrepancy is shown to be promising after passing its first reality test.

It's tough to get tightly-wound balls of DNA to lay down flat and straighten out to get their picture taken. A new technique from the Perkins group gets a crisp, clear picture in just five minutes.

Researchers at JILA and the University of Salamanca have found a new property of light, one that creates a whirling vortex that can speed itself up. 

Getting a cluster state of perfectly entangled atoms for quantum computing may be easier using a tool in JILA's laboratory.

JILA researchers have proposed an experiment that would allow them to study rapid scrambling of quantum information, similar to what happens at the event horizon of a black hole. 

Trapping single atoms is a bit like herding cats, which makes researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder expert feline wranglers. In a new study, a team led by physicist Cindy Regal showed that it could load groups of individual atoms into large grids with an efficiency unmatched by existing methods.  

By using ultrafast lasers to measure the temperature of electrons, JILA researchers have discovered a never-before-seen state in an otherwise standard semiconductor. This research is the most recent demonstration of a new technique, called ultrafast electron calorimetry, which uses light to manipulate well-known materials in new ways.

JILA researchers have demonstrated a much easier, faster and more precise way to understand the structure and function of the HIV RNA molecule, especially the HIV RNA hairpin. Furthermore, the techniques developed for this research promise to allow a wider range of users to study similar biological molecules, as they are built upon commercially available and user-friendly atomic force microscopes, or AFMs.

When the Ye group measured the total quantum state of buckyballs, we learned that this large molecule can play by full quantum rules. Specifically, this measurement resolved the rotational states of the buckyball, making it the largest and most complex molecule to be understood at this level.

JILA researchers have, for the first time, trapped a single alkaline-earth atom and cooled it to its ground state. To trap this atom, researchers used an optical tweezer, which is a laser focused to a pinpoint that can hold, move and manipulate atoms. The full motional and electronic control wielded by this tool enables microscopically precise studies of the limiting factors in many of today’s forefront physics experiments, especially quantum information science and metrology. 

Understanding chemistry requires understanding both molecules and quantum physics. The former defines the start and end of chemical reactions, the latter dictates the dynamics in between. JILA researchers now have a better understanding of both.

In the vast stretches between solar systems, heat does not flow and sound does not exist. Action seems to stop, but only if you don’t look long enough. Violent and chaotic actions occur in the long stretches of outer space. These chemical reactions between radicals and ions are the same reactions underlying the burn of a flame and floating the ozone above our planet. But they’re easy to miss in outer space because they’re very rare.