Research Highlights

Our Sun and its eight planets were born in a rough neighborhood nearly 5 billion years ago. Since then our star has traveled countless light years through the Milky Way, and our planet Earth has evolved the only intelligent life we know of in the Universe. Now, Earth's progeny are seeking to understand not only their own origins, but those of the Sun and its planets. 

Scientists anticipate that cold molecules will allow them to explore all kinds of exciting new cold-matter physics. For instance, cold molecules should be able to interact with each other over much longer distances than atoms. They often exhibit an uneven distribution of electric charge called a dipole moment. Unfortunately, the complicated structures of ordinary "warm" molecules means it is very difficult to directly cool them to very cold temperatures.

JILA physicists are investigating complex and interesting materials, circuits, and devices based on ultracold atoms instead of electrons. Collectively known as atomtronics, they have important theoretical advantages over conventional electronics, including (1) superfluidity and superconductivity, (2) minimal thermal noise and instability, and (3) coherent flow. With such characteristics, atomtronics could play a key role in quantum computing, nanoscale amplifiers, and precision sensors.

If you want to "see" physical objects whose dimensions are measured in nanometers and simultaneously probe the electronic structure of the atoms, molecules, and surfaces populating this nanoworld, you just might have to invent a new microscope. In fact, that's exactly what Fellow David Nesbitt's group recently accomplished.

Does the electron have an electric dipole moment (eEDM)? If it does, the standard model of elementary particle physics says this dipole moment is many orders of magnitude below what can be measured experimentally. As Fellow John Bohn quips, "It's a darn small one."

There is an enormous black hole at the center of every galaxy, gobbling up matter over eons of time - some for as long as 13 billion years. One of the great questions of modern astronomy is: Where did the seeds for all these black holes come from? Not, as you might think, from the fiery collapse of massive hot stars formed in the early Universe, says Fellow Mitch Begelman. That may well be how new, much smaller black holes are formed, even now. However, despite long-standing theories to the contrary, Begelman believes that ancient supernovae cannot account for the genesis of the black holes as massive as a million suns at the center of galaxies.

Under ordinary circumstances, making new molecules can be simple and straightforward - just a matter of mixing together some highly reactive chemicals and letting nature take its course. However, when the reactants are a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, the creation of new molecules requires the sophisticated tools of modern experimental physics. Using those tools, graduate student Scott Papp and Fellow Carl Wieman recently created the world's first ultracold diatomic molecules made from two different atoms.

Pancakes of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of polar molecules are repulsive and potentially unstable. However, the physics of these dipolar condensates is delicious, according to research associate Shai Ronen, graduate student Daniele Bortolotti, and Fellow John Bohn. The JILA theorists recently studied BECs with purely dipolar interactions in oblate (pancake) traps.

What do fermions in atomic nuclei, neutron stars, and ultracold trapped gases have in common? They have the same fundamental behavior. The exciting news is that there's now hard evidence that this is true, thanks to graduate students Jayson Stewart and John Gaebler, Cindy Regal who received her Ph.D. in physics in November, and Fellow Debbie Jin.

In the race to develop the world's best optical atomic clock, accuracy and precision are what count. Accuracy is the degree to which a measurement of time conforms to time's true value. Precision is a gauge of the exactness, or reproducibility, of the measurements. By definition, a high-precision clock must be extremely stable.

When illuminated by X-ray and infrared light beams in tandem, electrons can tap dance off a platinum surface because they've actually grabbed a photon from both beams simultaneously. As you might have guessed, there is more going on here than the ordinary photoelectric effect, which Albert Einstein explained more than a century ago. In the photoelectric effect, electrons escape from a solid after absorbing a single photon or bundle of light energy. 

For astrophysicists working to discover the origins of stars and planets, a small clue can go a long way. They can't get a close look at distant stars and planets, so they only know the barest details about other planetary systems. One such detail is that some extra-solar planets revolve around their stars in elliptical orbits rather than the nearly circular orbits that are the norm in our solar system. 

Left to their own devices, deuterium atoms would attach themselves to cold specks of soot floating in interstellar gas clouds and remain there for eternity. In fact, deuterium has a great affinity for the buckyballs, bucky onions, bucky tubes, and other forms of carbon, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, comprising soot. It readily replaces hydrogen in these molecules. Deuterium atoms bond to interstellar soot so tightly it takes an encounter with a hot star or supernova explosion to pry them loose.

"Chemistry is a highly improbable science," says Graduate Student Mike Deskevich, who adds "It's good for life on Earth that things are so unreactive." For instance, if chemical reactions happened easily and often, oxygen in the air would cause clothing and other flammable materials to burst into flame. In addition to making life difficult, high probability chemistry would render theoretical chemical physics much less interesting. As it is, theorists spend months determining the particular molecular shapes, vibrations, and energy states that make the simplest chemical reactions possible.

When will the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) fly? Fellows Jim Faller and Peter Bender first proposed the basic concept behind LISA more than 25 years ago. The joint European Space Agency/NASA mission first scheduled a possible launch in 2012. The date has now slipped to 2017, with additional delays possible. Both agencies are grappling with limited budgets and conflicting priorities. In the United States, plans for a future manned spaceflight to Mars are competing for funding with basic science-oriented space programs like LISA.

The breakdown of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the stratosphere has been implicated in the destruction of Earth's protective ozone layer. Consequently, scientists have undertaken studies to better understand the structure and behavior of highly reactive, but short-lived, free radicals produced during the breakdown process. The molecules, which contain either fluorine or chlorine, are an important source of atmospheric halogen atoms. Elucidating their 3D structure and dynamical behavior will help scientists better understand atmospheric chemistry as well as their fundamental molecular properties.

A solvent is something that dissolves or disperses something else. It's the water in salt water, the alcohol in cough syrup, the lactates or ethers in inks. For many of us, solvents are the background music of the chemistry taking place all around us. But this isn't how Fellow Carl Lineberger and his colleagues in chemical physics think about solvents. Lineberger, Former Research Associate Vladimir Dribinski, Graduate Students Jack Barbera and Josh Martin, and student visitor Annette Svendsen see them as key players in some chemical reactions, right down to the level of quantum mechanical interactions.

"In the right light, in the right time, everything is extraordinary," according to photographer Aaron Rose. He could have just as easily been describing precision optical spectroscopy experiments recently conducted by Research Associates Tanya Zelevinsky and Tetsuya Ido, Graduate Students Martin Boyd and Andrew Ludlow, Fellow Jun Ye and collaborators from Poland's Instytut Fizyki and NIST's Atomic Physics Division.

Life can be challenging on the biophysics research frontier. Consider gold nanoparticles as a research tool, for example. Gold is ductile and malleable as well as being a good conductor of heat and electricity. Its unique chemistry allows proteins and DNA to be easily attached to these nanoparticles. Physicists have been investigating gold nanoparticles in optical-trapping experiments because they enhance trapping efficiency and potentially increase detection sensitivity.

The fine structure constant is getting a lot of attention these days. Known as α, it is the "coupling constant," or measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs how electrons, muons, and light interact. What's intriguing is that new models for the basic structure of matter predict that α may have changed over vast spans of cosmic time, with the largest variations occurring in the early universe. However, the Standard Model says a has always been the same. Our basic understanding of physics depends on scientists' ability to determine whether or not α is an "inconstant constant."