Research Highlights

JILA’s quest to determine whether the electron has an electric dipole moment (eEDM) began in 2006 with a suggestion by Fellow Eric Cornell that the molecular ion hafnium fluoride (HfF⁺) might be well suited for an eEDM experiment. An electric dipole moment is a measure of the separation of positive and negative charges in a system. If an electron does have an electric dipole moment, it’s a pretty darn small one. So small, in fact, that if the electron were the size of the Earth, its eEDM would only alter the planet’s roundness by less than the width of a human hair.

Supernova 1987A is illuminating its own past. The brightest supernova to light up Earth’s night skies since the Renaissance, it appeared in the southern sky on February 23, 1987 when a blue supergiant star exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy located 160,000 light years from Earth. For nearly 25 years, Fellow Dick McCray and his colleagues have studied the unfolding story of this remarkable event in the visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray wavelengths. Today, the scientists not only understand the star’s spectacular demise, but also are now learning about the blue supergiant’s chemistry prior to going supernova.

Predrag Ranitovic dreams of controlling chemical reactions with ultrafast lasers. Now he and his colleagues in the Kapteyn/Murnane group are one step closer to bringing this dream into reality. The group recently used a femtosecond infrared (IR) laser and two extreme ultraviolet (XUV) harmonics created by the same laser to either ionize helium atoms or prevent ionization, depending on experimental conditions. The researchers adjusted experimental conditions to manipulate the electronic structure of the helium atoms as well as control the phase and amplitude of the XUV laser pulses.

Theoretical physicists recently combined two powerful tools for exploring ultracold atomic gases: Optical lattices and Feshbach resonances. Optical lattices are crystals of light formed by interacting laser beams. Feshbach resonances in an ultracold atom gas occur at a particular magnetic field strength and cause ultracold atoms to form very large, loosely associated molecules. However, because lattice atoms interact strongly at a Feshbach resonance, the physics of Feshbach resonances in an optical lattice is quite complicated.

The Lehnert group and collaborators from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently made what was essentially a CT scan of the quantum state of a microwave field. The researchers made 100 measurements at different angles of this quantum state as it was wiggling around. Because they only viewed the quantum state from one angle at a time, they were able to circumvent quantum uncertainties to make virtually noiseless measurements of amplitude changes in their tiny microwave signals. Multiple precision measurements of the same quantum state yielded a full quantum picture of the microwave field.

The semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) is used to make tiny structures in electronic devices such as integrated circuits, light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, and solar cells that directly convert light into electrical energy. Because of GaAs’s importance to modern electronics, the Cundiff group seeks to understand the fundamental physics of its light-matter interactions on atomic and electronic levels.

The Lewandowski group recently decided to see what would happen if it could get cold molecules (1K–1mK) and ultracold (<1mK) atoms to collide. Former graduate student L. Paul Parazzoli, graduate student Noah Fitch, and Fellow Heather Lewandowski devised a novel experiment to determine the collision behavior of cold (100 mK) deuterated ammonia (ND₃) molecules and ultracold (600 microK) rubidium (Rb) atoms.

Triatomic hydrogen ion (H3+) has many talents. In interstellar clouds, it can be blown apart by free low-energy free electrons, which interact with the ion core (H3+), briefly forming unstable H3 molecules. The interaction of the electron with the ion core almost immediately causes the molecule to fall apart into three hydrogen atoms (3H) or a hydrogen molecule (H2) and an H atom. This reaction is known as dissociative recombination.

In science, it can be fun and interesting to upend conventional wisdom. A good example is what just happened to a widely accepted explanation for overstretching of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA). Overstretching occurs suddenly when researchers add a tiny increment of force to dsDNA that is already experiencing a pulling force of approximately 65 pN. (A piconewton is a trillionth of a newton, which is roughly equal to the gravitational force on a medium-sized apple). The small additional force causes the dsDNA to suddenly become 70% longer — as it stretches like a slinky.

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, is a powerful new instrument scanning the Universe. COS was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Since then, it has been searching for clues about the composition of the Universe, including how galaxies like our own Milky Way formed and evolved over time. It is seeing beautiful things never before detected in the Universe because it is the lowest-noise ultraviolet (UV) spectrograph ever built for space exploration.

The dance of electrons as a bromine molecule (Br₂) separates into two atoms is intricate and complex. The process of breaking up takes far longer than expected (~150 vs 85 fs) because the cloud of electrons that bind atoms together in a molecule behaves as if it were still surrounding a molecule until the last possible moment — when the atomic fragments are about twice the normal distance apart (~.55 nm). At this point, there’s simply not enough energy left in the system to hold the molecule together. When the two atoms finally appear as separate entities, it was if someone had snapped a rubber band.

In 2008, the Ye and Jin groups succeeded in making ultracold potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules in their ground state (See “Redefining Chemistry at JILA” in the Spring 2010 issue of JILA Light & Matter). Their next goal was to figure out how to precisely control chemical reactions of these ultracold polar molecules by manipulating the quantum states of the reactants. But first the researchers had to discover how to calm those reactions down enough to study them. Under the conditions in which they were made (an optical trap allowing motion in all three dimensions), ultracold KRb molecules were so chemically reactive they disappeared almost as soon as they were formed.

Putting the brakes on a superfluid dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) just got a whole lot more interesting. Last year, the Bohn theory group explored what would occur in a dipolar BEC when a laser probe — think of it like a finger — tickled a BEC just hard enough to excite a roton.

In 2008-2009, much to their amazement,researchers working on the Jun Ye group’s neutral Sr optical atomic clock discovered tiny frequency shifts caused by colliding fermions! They figured out that the clock laser was interacting slightly differently with the Sr atoms inside a one-dimensional (pancake-shaped) trap. The light-atom interactions resulted in the atoms no longer being identical. And, once they were distinguishable, formerly unneighborly atoms were able to run into each other, compromising clock performance.

Hot Jupiters — giant gas planets orbiting close to their parent stars — aren’t just scorched (at temperatures of >1000 K). They are also swollen up larger than can be explained by the intense heat from their host stars. Recently Fellow Rosalba Perna and her colleagues from Columbia University and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics suggested a reason why these planets are so puffed up: The swelling results from heat dissipated from electric currents generated by the interaction of robust magnetic fields (generated from deep within the giant planets) with strong atmospheric winds carrying charged particles called ions.

“Nature is built quantum mechanically,” says Fellow Jun Ye, who wants to understand the connections between atoms and molecules in complex systems such as liquids and solids (aka condensed matter). He says that the whole Universe is made of countless interacting particles, and it would be impossible to figure out the myriad connections between them one particle at a time, either theoretically or experimentally.

After he retired, Fellow Alan Gallagher decided to take his interest in solar energy in a whole new direction: He decided to design, build, and test a unique large-area frying pan heated by the Sun’s energy. The new solar frying pan was specifically tailored to the cooking of injera bread in East Africa.For more than 100 million people in East Africa, the thin, flexible, and pancakelike bread is a mainstay of their diet. It is usually eaten with a variety of thick sauces spread around the top of a large (~0.4 m diameter) slice, which serves as a shared “dinner plate.” 

Graduate students or research associates at JILA have the option of signing up to help teach after-school science classes to elementary and middle school students in the St. Vrain School District. The volunteers expect to stimulate the children to learn to think critically, enjoy science activities, and become confident in their own abilities to master difficult concepts. What they may not anticipate at first is that they will learn some important skills themselves, including the ability to communicate scientific concepts in everyday language and, with that new ability, gain a better understanding of education.

There are two competing ideas about the origin of the monster black holes at the center of galaxies. Both include exceptional stars that have never actually been observed: (1) massive population III (Pop III) stars (as big as a thousand Suns) made of pure hydrogen and helium that would have formed less than 100 million years after the Big Bang, and (2) gigantic quasistars whose shining envelopes were powered, not by nuclear fusion, but by energy emitted by the black holes inside them.

Of all the fundamental forces, gravity is the most difficult to precisely measure. This difficulty is reflected in how hard it is to accurately measure “Big G,” a fundamental constant that is part of the measurement of the gravitational force. In fact, big G is the least precisely measured fundamental constant in physics. Who would have imagined that the very first fundamental force to be discovered would still be somewhat mysterious more than 300 years later? Or, that a force most of us take for granted in everyday life is actually very hard to precisely measure?