Research Highlights

If you want to understand how chemical reactions happen, the ability to monitor dynamic positions of atoms in a molecule is critical. There's a well-known laser technique known as coherent Raman spectroscopy that uses a scattering laser pulse to set atoms vibrating and then measures the color shift of reflected light to detect vibration patterns. This technique has been used as a molecular fingerprinting device for simple motions of a molecule.

Fellows Deborah Jin, Jun Ye, and John Bohn are exploring new scientific territory in cold-molecule chemistry. Experimentalists Jin and Ye and their colleagues can now manipulate, observe, and control ultralow-temperature potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules in their lowest quantum-mechanical state. Theorist Bohn analyzes what the experimentalists see and predicts molecule behaviors under different conditions.

The cold-molecule collaboration has developed a method for directly imaging ultracold ground-state KRb molecules. Their old method required the transfer of ultracold KRb molecules into a Feshbach state, which is sensitive to electric and magnetic fields. Thus researchers had to turn off the electric field and keep the magnetic field at a fixed value during the imaging process.

Fellow Phil Armitage and colleagues from the Université de Bordeaux and Google, Inc. are key players in the quest to understand the secrets of planet formation. Current theory posits that there are three zones of planet formation around a star (as shown in the figure). In Zone One, the hot innermost zone, small rocky planets form over a period of hundreds of millions of years. The planets form too slowly to accrete gas from the original planetary disk. Zone One is the terrestrial, or habitable, zone.

When Richard Sandberg and his colleagues in the Kapteyn/Murnane group developed a lensless x-ray microscope in 2007 (see JILA Light & Matter, Winter 2008), they were delighted with their ability to obtain a stick-figure image (below) that was comparable in resolution to one from a scanning-electron microscope. 

Imagine being able to observe how a magnet works at the nanoscale level, both in space and in time. For instance, how fast does a nanoscale magnetic material switch its orientation? What if understanding magnetic switching might lead to the use of the spin of an electron rather than its charge to create new devices? A new method for investigating such possibilities is just beginning to be explored.

Mathias Weber and his team recently did the following experiment: They excited the methyl group (CH₃) on one end of nitromethane anion (CH₃NO₂^-) with an infrared (IR) laser. The laser got the methyl group vibrating with enough energy to get the nitro group (NO₂) at the other end of the molecule wagging hard enough to spit out its extra electron.

The Dana Z. Anderson group has developed a microchip-based system that not only rapidly produces Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), but also is compact and transportable. The complete working system easily fits on an average-sized rolling cart. This technology opens the door to using ultracold matter in gravity sensors, atomic clocks, inertial sensors, as well as in electric- and magnetic-field sensing. Research associate Dan Farkas demonstrated the new system at the American Physical Society’s March 2010 meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, March 15–19, 2010.

Fellow Phil Armitage studies the migration of gas giant planets through evolving protoplanetary disks. He and former JILA postdoc Richard Alexander (Universiteit Leiden) have designed relatively simple models that reproduce the observed frequency and distribution of extra-solar giant planets, many of which orbit very close to their stars. The models also replicate the masses, lifetimes, and evolution of protoplanetary disks.

Not content with stepping on their bathroom scales each morning to watch the arrow spin round to find their weights, former research associate John Teufel and Fellow Konrad Lehnert decided to build a nifty system that could measure more diminutive forces of half an attoNewton (0.5 x 10^-18 N). Their new system consists of a tiny oscillating mechanical wire embedded in a microwave cavity with an integrated microwave interferometer, two amplifiers (one of them virtually noiseless), and a signal detector.

Carl Lineberger and his group recently achieved some exciting firsts: (1) the experimental observation of the oxyallyl diradical, a key intermediate in a series of important chemical reactions, and (2) the posting of an abstract of the Angewandte Chemie cover story reporting this achievement — on Facebook! While the Lineberger group is responsible for the clever design of the photoelectron spectroscopy experiments that led to the observation of oxyallyl diradical, Lineberger was astonished that his work got on Facebook. He speculated that the journal’s publisher, Wiley-VCH, was responsible.

Heat does not always flow as rapidly near nanostructures as it typically does in solids. Instead, it can go ballistic! Ballistic heat transfer occurs near a tiny device if its size is smaller than the distance a phonon, or lattice vibration, travels before colliding with another phonon. When this happens, heat flow is reduced, and a nanoscale hot spot is created. Ballistic heat transfer away from a hot spot can be as much as three times less efficient than ordinary heat diffusion.

The merger of supermassive black holes is a hot topic in astrophysics. Such mergers may occur after the formation of black hole binaries during galaxy collisions. The mergers are predicted to emit gravitational waves, whose detection is the mission of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). In preparation for the LISA mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2035, Fellow Peter Bender is working with colleagues around the world to improve LISA’s design (see JILA Light & Matter, Summer 2006). 

Fellow Ralph Jimenez is applying his knowledge of lasers, microscopy, and the precise control of tiny amounts of fluids to the development of a battery-powered blood analyzer for use "off-grid" in Third World countries. He is collaborating with Jeff Squier, David Marr, and their students from the Colorado School of Mines and Charles Eggleton and his student from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to see if they can come up with a fast and accurate way to measure the elasticity, or stiffness, of individual red blood cells as they flow through an "optical lab on a chip."

The race to measure the electron’s electric dipole moment (eEDM) is picking up speed across the world, thanks to graduate student Ed Meyer of JILA’s Lazy Bohn’s Ranch (i.e., John Bohn’s theory group). Meyer has identified more than a dozen horses, a.k.a. molecules and molecular ions, with strong enough internal electric fields to compete in the eEDM derby. Imperial College of London’s Ed Hinds is riding YbF (ytterbium fluoride) and leads by a nose.

Most known extrasolar planetary systems comprise planets whose orbits vary wildly from the nearly circular ellipses found in our solar system. This wide variation in eccentricity is thought to occur when large gas planets interact with each other, causing gyrations in planetary orbits, planet migrations toward and away from the central star, and even the ejections of planets out of the star system. 

The Anderson and Cornell groups have adapted two statistical techniques used in astronomical data processing to the analysis of images of ultracold atom gases. Image analysis is necessary for obtaining quantitative information about the behavior of an ultracold gas under different experimental conditions. 

According to the laws of quantum mechanics, identical fermions at very low temperatures can’t collide. These unfriendly subatomic particles, atoms, or molecules simply will not share the same piece of real estate with an identical twin. A few years back, researchers in the Ye lab considered this unneighborly behavior a big advantage in designing a new optical atomic clock based on an ensemble of identical ⁸⁷Sr atoms. 

A while back, former graduate student Scott Papp, graduate student Juan Pino, and Fellow Carl Wieman decided to see what would happen as they changed the magnetic field around a mixture of two different rubidium (Rb) isotopes during Bose-Einstein condensation.

The new molecules are as big as a virus. They’re ultracold. And, they’re held together by a ghostly quantum mechanical force field with the energy of about 100 billionths of an electron volt. These strange diatomic rubidium (Rb) molecules are the world’s first long-range Rydberg molecules. They were recently formed in Tilman Pfau’s laboratory at the University of Stuttgart from an ultracold cloud of Rb atoms.