News

JILA Fellow Jun Ye was named the 2018 winner of the I. I. Rabi Award by the IEEE Frequency Control Symposium. Ye was recognized “for the development of stabile, reproducible, and accurate atomic clocks based on optical lattices, and the use of those clocks to probe fundamental atomic interactions and quantum many-body systems.”

The Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on November 29, 2017 the election of JILA Fellow Jun Ye as a Foreign Member, China’s highest honor for foreign scientists: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) promotes scientific and technological advances across the world. CAS includes a network of more than 100 research and development organizations across the world; three universities; and a traditional merit-based academy analogous to the US National Academy of Sciences to recognize and convene scientific leaders from across the world.

Leah Dodson won the Miller Prize at the 72nd International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, held June 19–23 in Urbana, Illinois. Dodson is an NRC postdoc whose official advisor is Jun Ye, but who primarily works on molecular spectroscopy in the Mathias Weber lab. Her award-winning talk was entitled “Oxalate Formation in Titanium––Carbon Dioxide Anionic Clusters Studied by Infrared Photodissociation Spectroscopy.”

Bryce Bjork’s talk entitled “Direct Measurement of OD+CO-> cis-DOCO, trans-DOCO, and D+CO₂ Branching Kinetics using Time-Resolved Frequency Comb Spectroscopy” was selected by a panel of judges at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy as one of three winners of the 2017 Rao Prize. The prize will be presented to Bjork at the June 2018 Symposium.

Fellows Jun Ye and Deborah Jin (1968–2016) have been named Highly Cited Researchers for 2016 by Thomson Reuters. Highly Cited Researchers is an annual list that recognizes leading researchers from around the world based on an analysis of their research publications The 2016 list recognizes the most-cited authors of research publications in the period 2004 through 2014. Ye and Jin are two of 110 people in the physics category in this year's list.

NRC Postdoc Ed Marti received an Outstanding Presentation Award for his presentation of the poster "Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermions in an Optical Clock" at the 2016  Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium held on July 20. This recognition was shared with NRC Postdoc Shimon Kolkowitz, who originally submitted the abstract as well as prepared the poster and a two-minute–two-slide synopsis of the work. Marti did a great job with both the oral and poster presentations even though he had just one day's notice after family matters kept Dr Kolkowitz from participating in the conference.

President Obama has selected JILA Fellow Jun Ye of NIST's Quantum Physics Division to receive a 2015 Presidential Rank Award. The award cited Ye's work advancing "the frontier of light-matter interaction and focusing on precision measurement, quantum physics and ultracold matter, optical frequency metrology, and ultrafast science."

Deborah Jin and Jun Ye are Highly Cited Researchers for 2015, according to the Thomas Reuters website. The website states, "Highly Cited Researchers 2015 represents some of world’s most influential scientific minds. About three thousand researchers earned this distinction by writing the greatest number of reports officially designated by Essential Science Indicators as Highly Cited Papers—ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication, earning them the mark of exceptional impact."

Two JILA graduate students and one undergraduate student were recognized with awards for their posters and presentations at the recent Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium, held at NIST Boulder (325 Broadway) on Wednesday, June 18, 2014. The Outstanding Presentation Award is a special recognition for selected poster presenters at the Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium. 

JILA researchers garnered two Outstanding Presentation awards at the Boulder Laboratories 10^th annual  Postdoctoral Poster Symposium held on July 17, 2013. Bryce Gadway, a research associate in the Ye group, was recognized for his presentation “Realizing a Lattice Spin System with Ultracold Polar Molecules.” Gadway’s co-authors included poster co-presenter Jacob Covey as well as Bo Yan, Steve Moses, Kaden Hazzard, Ana Maria Rey, Deborah Jin, and Jun Ye. Covey was cited for doing a commendable job as a presenter.

Last year the Ye group conducted an actual laboratory astrophysics experiment. Graduate students Brian Sawyer, Ben Stuhl, and Mark Yeo, research associate Dajun Wang, and Fellow Jun Ye fired cold hydroxyl (OH) radicals into a linear decelerator equipped with an array of highly charged electrodes and slowed the OH molecules to a standstill.

Using an ultra-stable laser to manipulate strontium atoms trapped in a "lattice" made of light, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder have demonstrated the capability to produce the most precise "ticks" ever recorded in an optical atomic clock.

Number 757 #1, December 7, 2005 by Phil Schewe and Ben Stein

The Top Physics Stories for 2005

At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, the four large detector groups agreed, for the first time, on a consensus interpretation of several year’s worth of high-energy ion collisions: the fireball made in these collisions -- a sort of stand-in for the primordial universe only a few microseconds after the big bang -- was not a gas of weakly interacting quarks and gluons as earlier expected, but something more like a liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons (PNU 728).

Physicists at JILA, the joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado, have created a new optical process to extend the production of coherent radiation into the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This process takes advantage of the fact that ultrafast laser pulses of femtosecond widths, separated by nanoseconds, manifest themselves as a superposition of light at different frequencies over a wide spectral band. 

We've come a long way from the days when the length of the king's forearm was used to determine an object's size. Then, it was called the cubit, but the succession of short- and long-limbed kings made uniformity difficult. More modern standardized measures have helped. But these days, even those aren't enough. That's why the agency that sets measurement standards for the United States - the National Institute of Standards and Technology - is asking American technologists to assess the needs for new ones. With 80 percent of world trade dependent on such standards, NIST wants to be up to speed.

The world's most accurate "ruler" made with extreme ultraviolet light has been built and demonstrated with ultrafast laser pulses by scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.