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Margaret Murnane Elected Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy

04/17/2013
Margaret Murnane

Margaret Murnane was elected an Honory Member of the Royal Irish Academy in March of 2013. She was nominated for the honor by Professor Eugene Kennedy, MRIA, and Professor Luke Drury, MRIA. Murnane is a Fellow of JILA and a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder.Read more »

Trapper Marmot and the Stone Cold Molecules

Artist conception of the apparatus for two-dimensional (2D) magneto-optical trap
Close-up of 2D MOT showing how rapid reversal of magnetic fields and alternating

The Ye group has opened a new gateway into the relatively unexplored terrain of ultracold chemistry. Read more »

The Transporter

Artist’s concept of the Lehnert group’s information transporter. The transporter

The Lehnert group has come up with a clever way to transport and store quantum information. Research associate Tauno Palomaki, graduate student Jennifer Harlow, NIST colleagues Jon Teufel and Ray Simmonds, and Fellow Konrad Lehnert have encoded a quantum state onto an electric circuit and figured out how to transport the information from the circuit into a tiny mechanical drum, where is stored. Read more »

Position Wanted

Artist’s concept of the Regal group’s laser-light experiment to measure the posi

Researchers in the Regal group have gotten so good at using laser light to track the exact position of a tiny drum that they have been able to observe a limit imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics. In a recent experiment, research associate Tom Purdy, graduate student Robert Peterson, and Fellow Cindy Regal were able to measure the motion of the drum by sending light back and forth through it many times. During the measurement, however, 100 million photons from the laser beam struck the drum at random and made it vibrate. Read more »

Model Behavior

The quantum behavior of atoms (upper left) in an everyday solid (lower left) can

Ana Maria Rey’s group is devising new theoretical methods to help experimentalists Read more »

Physicists on the Verge of a Mean-Field Breakdown

An accurate theoretical description of the behavior of a strongly interacting ul

When experimental physicists at Penn State were unable to observe some of the predicted behaviors of ultracold rubidium (Rb) atoms expanding inside a two-dimensional crystal of light, they turned to their theorist colleagues at the City University of New York and JILA for an explanation. Read more »

The Pathfinder

The Cundiff group’s new 3D Fourier-transform spectroscopy technique (modeled as

The Cundiff group has taken an important step forward in the study of the quantum world. It has come up with an experimental technique to measure key parameters needed to solve the Schrödinger equation.Read more »

The Big Chill

The Ye group has shown that evaporative cooling can cool a gas of hydroxyl radic

The Ye and Bohn groups have made a major advance in the quest to prepare “real-world” molecules at ultracold temperatures. Read more »

The Heart of Darkness

A look inside the Thompson group’s superradiant laser reveals that the atoms at

When the Thompson group first demonstrated its innovative “superradiant” laser the team noticed that sometimes the amount of light emitted by the laser would fluctuate up and down.  The researchers wondered what was causing these fluctuations. Read more »

The Amazing Plasmon

Experimental setup for monitoring electron emission from the surface of a gold n

The Nesbitt group has figured out the central role of “plasmon resonances” in light-induced emission of electrons from gold or silver nanoparticles. Plasmons are rapid-fire electron oscillations of freely moving (conduction) electrons in metals. They are caused by light of just the “right frequency.” Read more »