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Henry Kapteyn Elected as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences

04/30/2013
Henry Kapteyn

Henry Kapteyn has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced on April 30, 2013. Kapteyn joins seven other members of the JILA faculty as members of the academy. They include John Hall (1984), Carl Wieman (1995), Eric Cornell (2000), Margaret Murnane (2004), Deborah Jin (2005) and Jun Ye (2011). NIST Nobel Laureate Dave Wineland and CU Physics Professors Noel Clark and John Wahr are also academy members.Read more »

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 »

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 »

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 Most Stable Clock in the World

The inner workings of the Sr-lattice optical atomic clock under development in t

The world’s most stable optical atomic clock resides in the Ye lab in the basement of JILA’s S-Wing. The strontium-(Sr-)lattice clock is so stable that its frequency measurements don’t vary by more than 1 part in 100 quadrillion (1 x 10-17) over a time period of 1000 seconds, or 17 minutes. Read more »