Welcome to the Ye Research Group

"Every time you peel off another layer of nature and look in a little bit further,
it gives you the most fantastic feeling."

Breaking News: "JILA Physicists Achieve Elusive 'Evaporative Cooling' of Molecules"

Achieving a goal considered nearly impossible, JILA physicists have chilled a gas of molecules to very low temperatures by adapting the familiar process by which a hot cup of coffee cools.

Evaporative cooling has long been used to cool atoms, at JILA and elsewhere, to extraordinarily low temperatures. The process was used at JILA in 1995 to create a then-new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms. The latest demonstration, reported in the Dec. 20, 2012, issue of Nature,* marks the first time evaporative cooling has been achieved with molecules—two different atoms bonded together.  Read more...NIST Tech Beat: December 19, 2012

"The Big Chill"

The Ye and Bohn groups have made a major advance in the quest to prepare “real-world” molecules at ultracold temperatures. As recently reported in Nature, graduate students Ben Stuhl and Mark Yeo, research associate Matt Hummon, and Fellow Jun Ye succeeded in cooling hydroxyl radical molecules (*OH) down to temperatures of no more than five thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (5mK). Read more... JILA Research Highlights: December 20, 2012

Nature 492, 396-400 (December 2012) "Evaporative cooling of the dipolar hydroxyl radical"

Nature 492, 364-365 (December 2012) "Cool Molecules"