Research Highlights

There's only one way to prove you've invented a better atomic clock: Come out on top of a comparison of your clock with one of the world's best atomic clocks: The NIST-F1 cesium fountain atomic clock, the nation's primary time and frequency standard. NIST-F1 is so accurate it won't gain or lose a second in more than 60 million years.

Galaxy clusters contain enormous clouds of gas whose cooling should result in the formation of a multitude of new stars. But that's not what NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is detecting. Instead there's a whole lot less gas cooling and new star formation than scientists had predicted. Perhaps the most mysterious discovery of all is that the clusters are humming – a low B-flat 57 octaves below middle C. The hum originates from ripples of sound waves washing through great galactic gas clouds surrounding supermassive black holes.

Imagine trying to describe the intricate motions of a single atom as it interacts with a laser. Then suppose you could generalize this understanding to a whole cloud of similar atoms and predict the temperatures your experimental physicist colleagues could achieve with laser cooling. This way-cool theoretical analysis comes compliments of Graduate Student Josh Dunn and Fellow Chris Greene.

Juri Toomre and his group concentrate their stellar research close to home--just 93 million miles away, to be precise. They want to answer the question: What dynamic processes occur deep within the Sun? To find out, they use a powerful combination of computer simulations and helioseismology (which analyzes sound waves produced by the Sun to probe its internal structure.) The researchers believe that working out the details of the Sun's internal structure should lead to explanations for the 22-year sunspot cycle and other regular surface features such as the Sun's consistent, but variable, rotation rate.

Our lives depend on heme. As part of hemoglobin, it carries oxygen to our tissues. As part of cytochrome c, it helps transform the energy in food into the energy-rich molecule ATP (adenosine triphosphate) that powers biochemical reactions that keep us alive and moving. As part of cytochrome P450, it helps break down toxic chemicals in our bodies.

Science sleuths have a new and powerful method for identifying (and investigating) atoms and molecules, thanks to Graduate Student Mike Thorpe, Research Associate Kevin Moll, Senior Research Associate Jason Jones, Undergraduate Student Assistant Ben Safdi, and Fellow Jun Ye. The new method allows them to study molecular vibrations, rotations, and collisions as well as temperature changes and chemical reactions.

Gamma-ray bursts signal the birth of a new black hole, whether it's created during the collapse of a massive star or via a merger between two compact objects such as neutron stars. Astrophysicists have determined that long gamma-ray bursts are associated with collapsing stars and short bursts are associated with binary mergers. In both cases, however, black-hole accretion powers the burst. 

Black holes are pretty strange, sucking in not only nearby matter but also the space around it. These cosmic vacuum cleaners are powered by thin, gaseous accretion disks in orbit around them. Something drives the orbiting gas to spiral in toward the black hole, where all trace of it disappears forever into the singularity. One of the exciting challenges in astrophysics is to figure out the physics driving this process, which keeps black holes growing for billions of years after they're formed.

One fun thing theorists do is undertake creative projects that predict phenomena that haven't yet been observed experimentally. In fact, sometimes they even predict things no one has ever imagined before. In other cases, the goal is to unravel the mechanism behind an experimental result that initially seems to conflict with the known laws of quantum physics. Fellow Chris Greene's group enjoys self-driven, innovative work in both categories.

JILA physicists are collaborating to explore the link between superconductivity and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of fermions at ultracold temperatures. Fermions have an odd number of total protons, neutrons, and electrons, giving them a half integer spin, which is either up or down. At ultracold temperatures, this means fermions can't just occupy the same energy level (like bosons, which have an even number of atomic constituents) and form one superatom in a BEC. Instead, they stack up in the lowest energy states, with two fermions in each state, one spin up and one spin down, forming a Fermi sea.

When molecules smash into each other, things happen on the quantum level. Electrons get shoved around. They may even jump from one atom to another. Spin directions can change. A chemical reaction may even take place. Since it's not possible to directly observe this kind of electron behavior, scientists want to be able to probe it with novel spectroscopies. Now, thanks to a recent theoretical study, ultracold spectroscopy looks particularly promising for elucidating electron behavior during molecular impacts.

We know a lot about cool stars because our Sun is one of them. However, we can't know for sure if cool stars produce winds (like the Sun does) without looking for evidence of such winds. Where stellar winds exist, they interact with hydrogen in the interstellar medium far from the star to produce tell-tale absorption in stellar ultraviolet spectral lines. 

One way to understand unstable molecules is to systematically create slightly different versions of a similar stable molecule and investigate each new molecule with identical analysis and experiments. That is exactly what researchers from JILA and CU are doing with a series of ringed molecules.

Graduate Student Sarah Thompson, Research Associate Eleanor Hodby, and Fellow Carl Wieman have come up with a novel way to assemble Feshbach molecules from a cloud of ultracold atoms. The molecules consist of very weakly bound atoms that are about as far apart in the molecular state as they are in the atom cloud from which they are formed. Understanding the properties of these molecules promises to help researchers better understand Bose-Einstein condensation and ultracold fermionic systems.

When Albert Einstein said, "the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once," he didn't know about studies performed by Senior Research Associate Christine Hackman and Fellow Judah Levine. These time-and-frequency experts work quite hard to devise ways of comparing the accuracy and stability of the world's premier atomic clocks - so that things like satellite communications and high-tech navigation can happen precisely when they're supposed to, including all at once.

High-energy radiation is notorious for damaging DNA, primarily by breaking chemical bonds. Damage to DNA can cause mutations, cancer, or even death. Much of this damage is inflicted by secondary, or low-energy, electrons knocked out of atoms in the DNA molecules by radiation. The low-energy electrons get captured by the DNA bases (which make up the letters of the genetic code), temporarily forming a negatively charged molecule (anion). The anion lasts just long enough to transfer its excess energy to the weakest nearby chemical bond, often breaking it.

Scientists believe that planetary systems coalesce from disks of gas and dust orbiting a star. Similarly, stars can form within massive accretion disks orbiting a black hole. Determining the mechanisms that create stars and planets from these orbiting disks is a hot topic among astrophysicists, according to JILA Fellow Phil Armitage and colleagues W. K. M. Rice of the University of California, Riverside, and G. Lodato of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy.

Chemical physicists investigate the structure and behavior of atoms and molecules on the quantum level. Such research is particularly challenging when the molecule under investigation appears in small amounts and is rapidly transformed into something else, e.g., during combustion, chemical synthesis, or atmospheric chemical reactions. Happily, Research Associate Feng Dong, Fellow David Nesbitt, and former JILAn Scott Davis (now with Vescent Photonics in Denver) have developed an innovative method for studying such elusive chemicals.

"Watch" atoms collide! Thrill to the twists and turns of potassium atom wave functions as the atoms come closer and closer to impact! "See" the atoms deform, then recover as they smash together and fly apart inside a dense atomic vapor! It's all in a day's work for Graduate Student Virginia (Gina) Lorenz and Fellow Steve Cundiff.

Giant gas planets don't often stay in orbit where they're formed. They often move closer to their star or, occasionally, further away. Seldom do they remain in almost circular orbits such as those of Jupiter and Saturn. In fact, all but one of the giant gas planets discovered around other stars are closer to their star than Jupiter is to the Sun. A fraction of these planets are even closer than Mercury!