Research Highlights

It's tough to get tightly-wound balls of DNA to lay down flat and straighten out to get their picture taken. A new technique from the Perkins group gets a crisp, clear picture in just five minutes.

Researchers at JILA and the University of Salamanca have found a new property of light, one that creates a whirling vortex that can speed itself up. 

Getting a cluster state of perfectly entangled atoms for quantum computing may be easier using a tool in JILA's laboratory.

JILA researchers have proposed an experiment that would allow them to study rapid scrambling of quantum information, similar to what happens at the event horizon of a black hole. 

Trapping single atoms is a bit like herding cats, which makes researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder expert feline wranglers. In a new study, a team led by physicist Cindy Regal showed that it could load groups of individual atoms into large grids with an efficiency unmatched by existing methods.  

By using ultrafast lasers to measure the temperature of electrons, JILA researchers have discovered a never-before-seen state in an otherwise standard semiconductor. This research is the most recent demonstration of a new technique, called ultrafast electron calorimetry, which uses light to manipulate well-known materials in new ways.

JILA researchers have demonstrated a much easier, faster and more precise way to understand the structure and function of the HIV RNA molecule, especially the HIV RNA hairpin. Furthermore, the techniques developed for this research promise to allow a wider range of users to study similar biological molecules, as they are built upon commercially available and user-friendly atomic force microscopes, or AFMs.

When the Ye group measured the total quantum state of buckyballs, we learned that this large molecule can play by full quantum rules. Specifically, this measurement resolved the rotational states of the buckyball, making it the largest and most complex molecule to be understood at this level.

JILA researchers have, for the first time, trapped a single alkaline-earth atom and cooled it to its ground state. To trap this atom, researchers used an optical tweezer, which is a laser focused to a pinpoint that can hold, move and manipulate atoms. The full motional and electronic control wielded by this tool enables microscopically precise studies of the limiting factors in many of today’s forefront physics experiments, especially quantum information science and metrology. 

Understanding chemistry requires understanding both molecules and quantum physics. The former defines the start and end of chemical reactions, the latter dictates the dynamics in between. JILA researchers now have a better understanding of both.

In the vast stretches between solar systems, heat does not flow and sound does not exist. Action seems to stop, but only if you don’t look long enough. Violent and chaotic actions occur in the long stretches of outer space. These chemical reactions between radicals and ions are the same reactions underlying the burn of a flame and floating the ozone above our planet. But they’re easy to miss in outer space because they’re very rare.

Quantum computers are set to revolutionize society. With their expansive power and speed, quantum computers could reduce today’s impossibly complex problems, like artificial intelligence and weather forecasts, to mere algorithms. But as revolutionary as the quantum computer will be, its promises will be stifled without the right connections. Peter Burns, a JILA graduate student in the Lehnert/Regal lab, likens this stifle to a world without Wi-Fi.  

With the advent of the laser, the fuzzy bands glowing from atoms transformed into narrow lines of distinct color. These spectral lines became guiding beacons visible from the quantum frontier. More than a half century later, we stand at the next frontier. The elegant physics that will decode today’s mysteries (such as dark matter, dark energy, and the stability of our fundamental constants, to name a few) is still shrouded in shadows. But a new tool promises illumination. 

The chaos within a black hole scrambles information. Gravity tugs on time in tiny, discrete steps. A phantom-like presence pervades our universe, yet evades detection. These intangible phenomena may seem like mere conjectures of science fiction, but in reality, experimental comprehension is not far, in neither time nor space. Astronomical advances in quantum simulators and quantum sensors will likely be made within the decade, and the leading experiments for black holes, gravitons, and dark matter will be not in space, but in basements – sitting on tables, in a black room lit only by lasers.

The hardest problems are never solved by one person. They are solved by teams; or in the case of science, collaborations. It took a collaboration of 17 researchers, including four JILA fellows and another six JILA affiliates, just a little over five years to achieve robust polarization control over isolated attosecond (one billionth of a billionth of a second) pulses of extreme-ultraviolet light. 

A large fraction of JILA research relies on laser cooling of atoms, ions and molecules for applications as diverse as world-leading atomic clocks, human-controlled chemistry, quantum information, new forms of ultracold matter and the search for new details of the origins of the universe. JILAns use laser cooling every day in their research, and have mastered arcane details of the process.

JILA researchers have created a laser-controlled "electron faucet", which emits a stable stream of low-energy electrons. These faucets have many applications for ultrafast switches and ultrafast electron imaging. The electron faucet starts with gold, spherical nanoshells. “They are glass cores with a thin, gold layer over them,” said Jacob Pettine, the graduate student on the project. These nanoshells are truly on the nanoscale, measuring less than 150 nanometers in diameter, which is “something like a thousandth of the size of a human hair,” said Pettine.

“Well, this isn’t going to work.” That was recent JILA graduate Carrie Weidner’s first thought when her advisor, JILA Fellow Dana Anderson, proposed the difficult experiment: to build an interferometer unlike any before – an interferometer of shaking atoms. But the grit paid off, as this compact and robust interferometer outperforms all others in filtering and distinguishing signal direction. While the designs of most atom interferometers are symmetric and elegant, Weidner says the shaken-lattice experiment proposed by Anderson “is more like broken eggs.”

We all know what a tenth of a second feels like. It’s a jiffy, a snap of the fingers, or a camera shutter click. But what does 14 billion years–the age of the universe–feel like? JILA’s atomic clock has the precision to measure the age of the universe to within a tenth of a second. That sort of precision is difficult to intuit. Yet, JILA’s atomic clock, which is the most precise clock in the world, continues to improve its precision. The latest jump in precision, of nearly 50 percent, came about from a new perspective.

Jupiter is large enough to fit 1,300 Earths inside, and still have room. But like all planets, Jupiter was once nothing more than a cosmic dust bunny. A team of physicists at JILA and the University of Arizona, led by JILA Senior Research Associate Jake Simon, are studying how cosmic pebbles­­—­starting only a millimeter in size—can lead to the formation of planetesimals, the football-field-to-Delaware-sized primordial asteroids whose development defined our solar system’s architecture.