JILA News

Margaret Murnane has been awarded the 2017 Optical Society of America’s (OSA’s) Frederic Ives Medal/Quinn Prize. The award recognizes overall distinction in optics and is the highest award given by OSA. The award was given to Murnane “for pioneering and sustained contributions to ultrafast science ranging from femtosecond lasers to soft x-ray high-harmonic generation to attosecond studies of atoms, molecules, and surfaces.”

Ralph Jimenez received a Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for Superior Federal Service at a ceremony held in mid-December 2016. The Medal is the highest honor presented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Willie E. May presided over the awards ceremony, which was held concurrently at NIST's Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Boulder, Colorado, campuses.

Deborah Jin and Katharine Gebbie are two of 10 prominent scientists featured in "Gone in 2016: Notable Women in Science and Technology" written by Maia Weinstock. The article appeared online in Scientific American blogs on December 28, 2016. Jin, who died on September 15, 2016 at age 47, was a visionary researcher in ultracold atomic physics. Gebbie, who died on August 17 at age 84, began her career as an astrophysicist at JILA, then rose through the ranks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to become director of NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory. The loss of both women in 2016 was a great blow to JILA scientists and staff alike.

Kevin Cox has won a prestigious Army Research Lab ENIAC Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship!  Congratulations, Kevin!

Markus Raschke has been given a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation. The award is given in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. Award winners are invited to conduct reseach projects of their choice in cooperation with colleagues in Germany, with the goal of promoting international scientific cooperation.

Markus Raschke has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), according to an AAAS news release published on the web on November 21, 2016. Former JILAn Steven Cundiff was also elected a Fellow of the AAAS this year.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education just got a big boost from a new iPad App developed by the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado. The 99¢ App is an extension of the award-winning collection of computer simulations of topics in science and mathematics produced by the project.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has just published a profile of Fellow Henry Kapteyn, a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. The profile presents highlights of Kapteyn's life as well as his long and productive career in developing ultrashort-wavelength lasers, including table-top x-ray lasers. Many of Kapteyn's achievements occurred during a long and fruitful collaboration with his wife, Fellow Margaret Murnane. The profile accompanies Kapteyn’s Inaugural Article entitled "A new regime of nanoscale thermal transport: Collective diffusion increases dissipation efficiency."

A paper entitled Coherent Control of the Exciton-Biexciton System in an InAs Self-Assembled Quantum Dot Ensemble by Former JILA Fellow Steven T. Cundiff's group at the University of Michigan was published online in Physical Review Letters on October 6, 2016. Former JILANs Takeshi Suzuki and Rohan Singh were the paper's first and second authors, respectively. The new paper is both an Editor's Suggestion and is the basis for a highlight entitled "Decoding the Light from Ten Million Quantum Dots," on physics.aps.org.

Fellows Jun Ye and Deborah Jin (1968–2016) have been named Highly Cited Researchers for 2016 by Thomson Reuters. Highly Cited Researchers is an annual list that recognizes leading researchers from around the world based on an analysis of their research publications The 2016 list recognizes the most-cited authors of research publications in the period 2004 through 2014. Ye and Jin are two of 110 people in the physics category in this year's list.

Science News has a delightful profile of Senior Research Associate Tenio Popmintchev as part of the magazines annual feature: The SN10: Meet the scientists making the next big discoveries.

Deborah Jin passed away September 15, 2016, after a courageous battle with cancer. She was 47. Jin was an internationally renowned physicist and Fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Fellow of JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado.

Graduate student Maya Fabrikant has won one of three prizes awarded to the best posters presented by young researchers during the MOLEC 2016 conference held in Toledo, Spain September 11–16. Both graduate students and postdoctoral researchers were eligible for the prizes, which included a $200 Visa gift card. The three prizes were presented by the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

Fellows Cindy Regal and Konrad Lehnert have won the 2016 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research in Foundational Science and Technology, CO-LABS announced today. JILA Chair Dana Anderson submitted the nomination of their joint research on building, studying, and using devices that exploit the strange and powerful properties of quantum mechanics. The nomination was entitled, The JILA Quantum Machine Team: Extending Mastery of Quantum Mechanics from Microscopic Particles to Human-Made Machines.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has awarded David Nesbitt the 2017 E. Bright Wilson Award in Spectroscopy. The award, sponsored by the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry, recognizes outstanding accomplishments in fundamental or applied spectroscopy in chemistry. It consists of $5,000 and a certificate.

Katharine Gebbie, Senior Advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), died on August 17, 2016, after a short illness. She was 84. A legendary laboratory director at NIST, Gebbie was honored in 2015 when the most advanced laboratory building at NIST’s Boulder campus was renamed in her honor

Eric Coughlin has won the 2016 R. N. Thomas Award. The $1000 award comes from a fund established by Dr. Nora Andreasian, the widow of JILA co-founder Dick Thomas. Coughlin will also receive a book about Thomas’ storied career in astrophysics.

NRC Postdoc Ed Marti received an Outstanding Presentation Award for his presentation of the poster "Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermions in an Optical Clock" at the 2016  Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium held on July 20. This recognition was shared with NRC Postdoc Shimon Kolkowitz, who originally submitted the abstract as well as prepared the poster and a two-minute–two-slide synopsis of the work. Marti did a great job with both the oral and poster presentations even though he had just one day's notice after family matters kept Dr Kolkowitz from participating in the conference.

Jennifer Ellis won an Optical Society of America (OSA) award in recognition of her excellent oral contribution at the International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena, held July 17–22 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellis, who is a graduate student with the Kapteyn/Murnane group, spoke about her work on Femtosecond Dynamics of Solvated Electrons in Nanodroplets Probed with Extreme Ultraviolet Beams. She told how her group used EUV light to conduct time-resolved photoemission measurements of isolated nanodroplets in vacuum. With this technique, her group was able to observe what happens when nanodroplets absorb EUV photons. Ellis and her colleagues were able to watch the creation and relaxation of electrons surrounded by solvent molecules––inside the nanodroplets! Congratulations Jennifer!

Adam Kaufman has been awarded the 2016 DAMOP Thesis Prize for his outstanding thesis research on assembling neutral atoms in optical tweezers, work conducted in the Regal group at JILA. As part of this  work, Kaufman and his coworkers developed an experiment that allowed the team to use laser cooling to assemble arrays of ground-state neutral atoms in optical tweezers.