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Redefining Chemistry at JILA

Today’s cold molecule team (counterclockwise from bottom left): John Bohn, Debor
Researchers Deborah Jin and Jun Ye can now observe, manipulate, and control ultr
Silke Ospelkaus in the cold molecule lab. Credit: Greg Kuebler
Kang-Kuen Ni practicing her physics skills at home. Credit: Kang-Kuen Ni
Deborah Jin and Jun Ye in the cold molecule lab. Credit: Glenn Asakawa

Fellows Deborah Jin, Jun Ye, and John Bohn are exploring new scientific territory in cold-molecule chemistry. Experimentalists Jin and Ye and their colleagues can now manipulate, observe, and control ultralow-temperature potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules in their lowest quantum-mechanical state. Theorist Bohn analyzes what the experimentalists see and predicts molecule behaviors under different conditions. Read more »

Sculpting a Star System: The Outer Planets

Artist’s conception comparing the Epsilon Eridani star system to our own solar s

Fellow Phil Armitage and colleagues from the Université de Bordeaux and Google, Inc. are key players in the quest to understand the secrets of planet formation. Current theory posits that there are three zones of planet formation around a star (as shown in the figure). In Zone One, the hot innermost zone, small rocky planets form over a period of hundreds of millions of years. The planets form too slowly to accrete gas from the original planetary disk. Zone One is the terrestrial, or habitable, zone. Read more »

Close Encounters of the Third Dimension

Researchers at UCLA took single-wavelength X-ray data from the Kapteyn/Murnane g
Comparison of image reconstructions of a 7 µm stick girl figure with x-ray and s

    When Richard Sandberg and his colleagues in the Kapteyn/Murnane group developed a lensless x-ray microscope in 2007 (see JILA Light & Matter, Winter 2008), they were delighted with their ability to obtain a stick-figure image (below) that was comparable in resolution to one from a scanning-electron microscope. However, they didn’t know yet that this was not all they had accomplished. Their collaborators on this work, Professor John Miao and undergraduate Kevin Raines at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, took the Kapteyn/Murnane group’s experimental data and performed a three-dimensional (3D) image reconstruction of the stick figure. Read more »

The Magnetic Heart of the Matter

Reflection of a burst of X-ray photons (purple) off a compound consisting of nic

Imagine being able to observe how a magnet works at the nanoscale level, both in space and in time. For instance, how fast does a nanoscale magnetic material switch its orientation? What if understanding magnetic switching might lead to the use of the spin of an electron rather than its charge to create new devices? A new method for investigating such possibilities is just beginning to be explored. Read more »

Good Vibrations

Cover of the April 1, 2010, issue of J. Phys. Chem. A. Credit: J. Phys. Chem. A.
Artist’s rendition of a process in which one end of a negative ion is heated wit

Mathias Weber and his team recently did the following experiment: They excited the methyl group (CH3) on one end of nitromethane anion (CH3NO2-) with an infrared (IR) laser. The laser got the methyl group vibrating with enough energy to get the nitro group (NO2) at the other end of the molecule wagging hard enough to spit out its extra electron. The figure here, which appeared on the April 1, 2010, cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, shows an artist’s conception of the process from start to finish. The figure includes two photoelectron spectroscopic images that clearly distinguish between the loss of the extra electron due to nitro-group vibrations versus an ordinary chemical reaction. Read more »

The BEC Transporter

A color schematic of the Anderson group’s new two-chamber vacuum cell and its pl
The vacuum side of an atom microchip. Credit: Evan Salim

The Dana Z. Anderson group has developed a microchip-based system that not only rapidly produces Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), but also is compact and transportable. The complete working system easily fits on an average-sized rolling cart. This technology opens the door to using ultracold matter in gravity sensors, atomic clocks, inertial sensors, as well as in electric- and magnetic-field sensing. Research associate Dan Farkas demonstrated the new system at the American Physical Society’s March 2010 meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, March 15–19. Read more »

First Light

Simulation of gravitational radiation from the merger of two black holes. After

The merger of supermassive black holes is a hot topic in astrophysics. Such mergers may occur after the formation of black hole binaries during galaxy collisions. The mergers are predicted to emit gravitational waves, whose detection is the mission of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). In preparation for the LISA mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2018, Fellow Peter Bender is working with colleagues around the world to improve LISA’s design (see JILA Light & Matter, Summer 2006). Read more »

In the Beginning

Artist’s conception of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Fell

Before there were galaxies with black holes in their centers, there were vast reservoirs of dark matter coupled to ordinary matter, mostly hydrogen gas. These reservoirs were sprinkled with the Universe’s early stars born in pregalactic dark matter halos. But according to Fellow Mitch Begelman, another population of atypical stars formed millions of years later during the creation of galaxies. These stars grew to truly colossal sizes — a million times more massive than the Sun. These Titans of the early Universe burned out in less than two million years, a blink of an eye in a Universe whose years now number nearly 14 billion. But in their short time, they sowed the seeds for the black holes that grew to power mighty quasars and became the behemoths that now reside at the center of every galaxy in the Universe. Read more »

Stretched Thin

Sequence of red blood cells (A) relaxed as it enters the microfluidics chamber,

Fellow Ralph Jimenez is applying his knowledge of lasers, microscopy, and the precise control of tiny amounts of fluids to the development of a battery-powered blood analyzer for use "off-grid" in Third World countries. He is collaborating with Jeff Squier, David Marr, and their students from the Colorado School of Mines and Charles Eggleton and his student from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to see if they can come up with a fast and accurate way to measure the elasticity, or stiffness, of individual red blood cells as they flow through an "optical lab on a chip." Read more »

Nanomeasurement is a Matter of the Utmost Precision

False-color microscope images showing a freely suspended nanowire embedded in a

Not content with stepping on their bathroom scales each morning to watch the arrow spin round to find their weights, former research associate John Teufel and Fellow Konrad Lehnert decided to build a nifty system that could measure more diminutive forces of half an attoNewton (0.5 x 10-18 N). Their new system consists of a tiny oscillating mechanical wire embedded in a microwave cavity with an integrated microwave interferometer, two amplifiers (one of them virtually noiseless), and a signal detector. The system is so sensitive that at milliKelvin temperatures, it could weigh a cube of carbon atoms with 140 atoms on a side, or ~2.5 x 106 atoms. (According to Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856), this cube should weigh about 5 x 10-17 grams.) Read more »