JILA News

JILA graduate student John Robinson won the Student Paper Competition at the 2018 IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (IFCS). Finalists for the Student Paper Competition were selected by abstracts, and final judgements were based on poster presentations.

JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Ralph Jimenez received the 2017 Arthur S. Flemming Award for outstanding public service as a Federal employee. Jimenez was one of 12 honorees across all parts of the Federal government to receive the Flemming Award this cycle. Jimenez was a winner in the Applied Science and Engineering category for his pioneering research on combining microfluidics, ultrafast lasers, biochemistry and molecular biology to dramatically accelerate the creation and characterization of specialized biomolecules to serve as sensors within living cells.

It was a busy week for recent CU Boulder graduate Benjamin (Ben) Saarel. Saarel, who for the past two years has worked as an undergraduate researcher in JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski's lab, graduated summa cum laude on 10 May 2018, earning his B. S. in Engineering Physics, and a minor in Computer Science. But that's not all. 

JILA’s favorite degenerate, the Bose-Einstein Condensate, is headed on a new adventure this week. The BEC is going to space. BECs became a staple for measuring quantum phenomenon when they were experimentally realized in 1995 by JILA Fellows Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, and by Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT.

JILA graduate, Dr. Jennifer (Jen) Wightman Harlow, died in a rockfall accident on May 14, 2018. She was 33. Jen came to JILA in 2007 after earning her A.B. in physics from Harvard University. As a graduate student, Jen studied ultrasensitive measurement at the limits imposed by quantum mechanics in the lab of Konrad Lehnert. She graduated with her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013. Her thesis was entitlted, “Microwave Electromechanics: Measuring and Manipulating the Quantum State of a Macroscopic Mechanical Oscillator.”

William Patrick (Pat) McInerny passed away on May 4, 2018 after a long battle with kidney disease. He was 77. McInerny was the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Executive Officer for JILA from 1971 to 2003. He loved working at JILA, and managed all staff and finances while the institute developed much of the scientific reputation it enjoys today.

Henry Kapteyn has been elected as a 2018 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He joins some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts, including JILA Fellows David Nesbitt (2013), Margaret Murnane (2006), Eric Cornell (2005), and Carl Lineberger (1995), and such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin (1781), Alexander Hamilton (1791), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Charles Darwin (1874), Albert Einstein (1924), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966).

Frequency combs, a JILA technology both pioneered and perfected by JILA Fellow and Nobel laureate John “Jan” Hall, have found yet another application: quantifying methane leaks as tiny as a quarter of a human exhalation from nearly a mile away.

JILA Fellow Margaret Murnane was awarded the Science Foundation Ireland’s (SFI) prestigious St. Patrick’s Day Science Medal on 14 March 2018 in Washington D.C., for her significant contribution to academia, research and industry. Murnane’s many achievements include designing some of the fastest lasers in the world and creating table-top affordable X-ray lasers. Applications of both works advance the wider research community.

JILA graduate student Robert Karl, Jr won the 2018 Karl Urbanek Best Student Paper award at SPIE Advanced Lithography. Karl is a graduate student in the Kapteyn-Murnane group at JILA. His paper was entitled, “Characterization and Imaging of Nanostructured Materials using Tabletop Extreme Ultraviolet Light Sources”. The award was presented by metrology, inspection, and process control for microlithography conference chair Vladimir Ukrainsev, and conference co-chair Ofer Adan. 

JILA Fellow Jun Ye was named the 2018 winner of the I. I. Rabi Award by the IEEE Frequency Control Symposium. Ye was recognized “for the development of stabile, reproducible, and accurate atomic clocks based on optical lattices, and the use of those clocks to probe fundamental atomic interactions and quantum many-body systems.”

The Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on November 29, 2017 the election of JILA Fellow Jun Ye as a Foreign Member, China’s highest honor for foreign scientists: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) promotes scientific and technological advances across the world. CAS includes a network of more than 100 research and development organizations across the world; three universities; and a traditional merit-based academy analogous to the US National Academy of Sciences to recognize and convene scientific leaders from across the world.

The 5th annual JILA posterfest was a smashing success, thanks to the outstanding posters, as well as the snacks. The event, held this past Thursday, October 19, had 45 posters sharing the latest JILA research, from the very small (such as T. Thiele's,  "Toward Atomic Arrays Close to Nanoscopic Devices") to the very large (such as A. Zderic's "A Dynamical Instability in the Outer Solar System"). 

Former JILAn Dennis F. Gardner Jr. (Kapteyn-Murnane group) has been awarded the 2017 American Physical Society’s Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award for his doctoral work in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) imaging. Gardner received $1,000 and a certificate citing his contribution to laser science.

Fellow Tom Perkins has won a 2017 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research. Perkins will receive the award from Governor John Hickenlooper at an event sponsored by the CO-LABS consortium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on October 5, 2017. This year’s ninth annual event will honor Colorado’s top scientists and engineers for projects having a significant impact on society.

Ana Maria Rey has been appointed a NIST Fellow as of August 21,2017 by the Acting Director of NIST. JILA is a research and training partnership between the University of Colorado and NIST, and Ana Maria is one of the several JILA Fellows who are NIST employees. Ana Maria was named a NIST Fellow in recognition of her world-leading program in quantum theory, her pioneering work in quantum many-body physics, and her continuing powerful collaborations with experimentalists at JILA, at NIST, and across the world.

Leah Dodson won the Miller Prize at the 72nd International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, held June 19–23 in Urbana, Illinois. Dodson is an NRC postdoc whose official advisor is Jun Ye, but who primarily works on molecular spectroscopy in the Mathias Weber lab. Her award-winning talk was entitled “Oxalate Formation in Titanium––Carbon Dioxide Anionic Clusters Studied by Infrared Photodissociation Spectroscopy.”

Bryce Bjork’s talk entitled “Direct Measurement of OD+CO-> cis-DOCO, trans-DOCO, and D+CO₂ Branching Kinetics using Time-Resolved Frequency Comb Spectroscopy” was selected by a panel of judges at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy as one of three winners of the 2017 Rao Prize. The prize will be presented to Bjork at the June 2018 Symposium.

Dr. Stephen J. Smith, Founding Fellow of JILA, passed away on June 10, 2017, at the age of 92. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, three of his five sons, and four grandchildren. Smith was one of seven NIST scientists who relocated to Boulder, Colorado, in 1962, to found the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) with the University of Colorado Boulder Physics Department. The joint institute was officially launched April 13, 1962. Fifty years later, Smith contributed a delightful introduction entitled "Genesis: Inspiration for an institute" to the web book JILA: The First 50 Years.