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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 »

Refueling the Future — with Carbon Dioxide

Orientation of solvent molecules around a negatively charged gold-carbon dioxide

Graduate student Ben Knurr and Fellow Mathias Weber have added new insight into a catalytic reaction based on a single gold atom with an extra electron that transfers this electron into carbon dioxide molecules (CO2). This reaction could be an important first step future industrial processes converting waste CO2 back into chemical fuels. Read more »

The Entanglement Tango

Simplified schematic representation of simultaneous entanglement of many pairs o

Most scientists think it is really hard to correlate, or entangle, the quantum spin states of many particles in an ultracold gas of fermions. Fermions are particles like electrons (and some atoms and molecules) whose quantum spin states prevent them from occupying the same lowest-energy state and forming a Bose-Einstein condensate. Entanglement means that two or more particles interact and retain a connection. 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 »

Close Encounters with the Contact

The contact appears in ultracold gases under conditions when the atoms are close

The Jin and Cornell groups have discovered irrefutable evidence for the Read more »

Sizzling Vibrations

The absorption of two photons of 12-µm-long IR light can excite all the vibratio

Former research associate Antonio Picón, research associate Agnieszka Jaron-Becker, and Fellow Andreas Becker have discovered a way to make the hydrogen molecular ion (H2+) fall apart into its constituent atoms without exciting or ionizing the electron. Read more »

A More Perfectly Understood Union

The final step in the merger of two supermassive black holes is likely to genera

Research associate Bruno Giacomazzo recently studied the effects of magnetic Read more »