JILA Sites: JILA Physics Frontier Center JILA Members
The American Physical Society is memorializing Fellow Deborah Jin by renaming the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) Award for “Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics." Henceforward, the award will be called the Deborah Jin Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics.
On April...
Deborah Jin and Katharine Gebbie are two of 10 prominent scientists featured in "Gone in 2016: Notable Women in Science and Technology" written by Maia Weinstock. The article appeared online in Scientific American blogs on December 28, 2016. Jin, who died on September 15, 2016 at age 47, was a visionary researcher in ultracold atomic physics. Gebbie, who died on August 17 at age 84,...
Deborah Jin, Jun Ye, and their students wrote a review during the summer of 2016 for Nature Physics highlighting the accomplishments and future directions of the relatively new field of ultracold-molecule research. The field was pioneered by the group’s creation of the world’s first gas of ultracold potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules in 2008.
The molecules were made by first creating...
A Colorado Public Radio interview with Eric Cornell about his colleague, Deborah Jin, after her passing.
Fellows Jun Ye and Deborah Jin (1968–2016) have been named Highly Cited Researchers for 2016 by Thomson Reuters. Highly Cited Researchers is an annual list that recognizes leading researchers from around the world based on an analysis of their research publications The 2016 list recognizes the most-cited authors of research publications in the period 2004 through 2014. Ye and Jin are two of...
Note: Please read some remembrances here.
Deborah Jin passed away September 15, 2016, after a courageous battle with cancer. She was 47. Jin was an internationally renowned physicist and Fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Fellow of JILA, a joint institute...
Newly minted Ph.D. Ming-Guang Hu and his colleagues in the Jin and Cornell groups recently investigated immersing an impurity in a quantum bath consisting of a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. The researchers expected the strong impurity-boson interactions to “dress” the impurity, i.e., cause it to get bigger and heavier. In the experiment, dressing the impurity resulted in it becoming a...
The old JILA molecule factory (built in 2002) produced the world’s first ultracold polar molecules [potassium-rubidium (KRb)] in 2008. The old factory has been used since then for ultracold chemistry investigations and studies of the quantum behavior of ultracold molecules and the atoms that form them. The Jin-Ye group, which runs the molecule factory, is now wrapping up operations in the old...
JILA’s cold molecule collaboration (Jin and Ye Groups, with theory support from the Rey Group) recently made a breakthrough in its efforts to use ultracold polar molecules to study the complex physics of large numbers of interacting quantum particles. By closely packing the molecules into a 3D optical lattice (a sort of “crystal of light”), the team was able to create the first “highly...
Deborah Jin and Jun Ye are Highly Cited Researchers for 2015, according to the Thomas Reuters website. The website states, "Highly Cited Researchers 2015 represents some of world’s most influential scientific minds. About three thousand researchers earned this distinction by writing the greatest number of reports officially designated by Essential Science Indicators as Highly Cited Papers—...
Deborah Jin has been selected as chair-elect of the American Physical Society (APS) Nominating Committee. Beginning January 1, 2016, she will serve one year as Chair Elect, a year as Chair, and a year as Past Chair of the committee. The committee is charged with preparing a slate of at least two candidates for the positions of Vice President, Treasurer, Chair Elect of the Nominating Committee...
A grand challenge of ultracold physics is figuring out how fermions become bosons. This is an important question because the tiniest quantum particles of matter are all fermions. However, these fermions can form larger chunks of matter, such as atoms and molecules, which can be either fermions or bosons.
An interesting feature of fermions and bosons is that they behave very differently...
A newly released report from Thomson Reuters on "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014" includes JILAns Jun Ye and Debbie Jin. The selection of scientists for the report was based on an analysis of Web of Science and InCites citation reports for an 11-year period to identify those researchers who published the highest impact work from 2002–2012 and 2012–2013. The report...
Deborah Jin has won the 2014 Isaac Newton Medal, the highest accolade given by the Institute of Physics. She was cited for her experimental work in laser cooling atoms. This work has led to the practical demonstration of universal laws that underpin fundamental quantum behavior.
"Professor Jin is an outstanding, clever, creative scientist," said Prof. Ed Hinds of the Imperial...
There’s exciting news from JILA’s ultracold molecule collaboration. The Jin, Ye, Holland, and Rey groups have come up with new theory (verified by experiment) that explains the suppression of chemical reactions between potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules in the KRb quantum simulator. The main reason the molecules do not collide and react is continuous measurement of molecule loss from the...
Deborah Jin has been awarded the 2014 Comstock Prize in Physics by the National Academy of Sciences. The Comstock Prize recognizes an innovative discovery by a North American resident in the fields of electricity, magnetism, or radiant energy.
Jin received this year’s Comstock Prize for “demonstrating quantum degeneracy and the formation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate in...
The Cornell and Jin groups have just met the challenge of creating and studying an extremely strongly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). This feat was reported in Nature Physics online January 12, 2014. An example of an ordinary weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a quantum gas of rubidium atoms (85Rb) all piled up in a little ball whose temperature is a chilly 10 nK...
Research associate Bo Yan and his colleagues recently observed spin exchanges in ultracold potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules inside an optical lattice (a crystal of light formed by interacting laser beams). In solid materials, such spin exchanges are the building blocks of advanced materials and exotic behavior.
The spin exchanges occurred when a rotationally excited KRb molecule...
The U.S. Department of Energy today announced the members of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB). The nineteen member board comprised of scientists, business executives, academics and former government officials will serve as an independent advisory committee to Energy Secretary Moniz. Deborah Jin, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Professor...
Dr. Deborah Jin presents at the APS April Meeting 2013 on ultracold gases, interactions, and recent work on ultracold molecules.
On Thursday, March 28, Deborah Jin will be honored in a ceremony at the Sorbonne in Paris as the '2013 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards Laureate for North America', as part of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science program. One of five 2013 regional laureates, she was cited for being the first scientist in the world to create near absolute zero temperature potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules that...
Professor Deborah Jin and her team invented an ingenious method of cooling molecules down to near absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature -- which has the effect of slowing them down. In fact, they slow down enough for researchers to actually see what goes on during chemical reactions. The study of ultra-cold molecules could lead to new precision-measurement tools, new methods for...
What does it take to win a Nobel Prize? It turns out that a sense of humor helps. Meet some of the extraordinary scientists behind one of the University of Colorado Boulder's renowned joint institutes, JILA.
The Jin and Cornell groups have discovered irrefutable evidence for the contact. The contact appears in ultracold gases under conditions when the atoms are close “contact” in a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. Like pressure, volume, and temperature, the contact is an important property of ultracold ensembles of atoms. The contact is particularly important when the atoms interact...
Deborah Jin has been selected as one of five regional winners of the 2013 For Women in Science Awards. The awards are presented annually by the L’Oreal Foundation and UNESCO to recognize outstanding women worldwide who significantly advance science. Jin was selected by an international jury led by Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail “for having been the first to cool down molecules so much that she...
Members of the Jin group found a way to measure for the first time the a type of abstract “surface” in a gas of ultracold atoms that had been predicted in 1926 but not previously observed. Jin and her colleagues are leading researchers in the field of ultracold Fermi gases made up of thousands to millions of fermions.
Fermions, including electrons and some types of atoms such as...
Fellows Debbie Jin and Jun Ye will share a Department of Commerce Gold Medal this year for their seminal work on ultracold molecules and cold chemistry. The Gold Medal is the highest award presented by the Department of Commerce and NIST. The Gold Medal will be presented to Jin and Ye at a ceremony in December in Washington, D. C.
"It is the dedication of employees like Debbie and Jun...
Arman Cingoz and Brian Neyenhuis won awards for work presented at a recent Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium. The symposium was held June 22, 2011, from 1:00 to 5:00 pm in the main lobby of the Radio Building at the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Boulder campus.
Participants gave brief oral slide presentations describing the key points of their poster...
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...
In 2008, the Deborah Jin Group introduced a new technique, known as atom photoemission spectroscopy, to study a strongly interacting ultracold gas cloud of potassium (40K) atoms at the crossover point between Bose-Einstein condensation and superfl uidity via the pairing of fermionic atoms (See JILA Light & Matter, Summer 2008). Near the crossover point, the physics of superfl uidity in an...
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...
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. However, the...
Starting with ultracold atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate, it’s possible to create coherent superpositions of atoms and molecules. Fellow Carl Wieman and others have done exactly this. Recently, the Jin group wondered if it would be possible to accomplish the same thing starting with a normal gas cloud of atoms. To spice up the experiment, they included two kinds of atoms: neighborly...
The Jin and Ye groups recently crafted an entirely new form of matter — tens of thousands of ultracold polar molecules in their lowest energy state. The ground-state molecules are too cold to exist naturally anywhere in the Universe. But, like the Bose-Einstein condensates discovered in the mid-1990s, they promise to open the door to unprecedented explorations of the quantum world, including...
The Jin group recently came up with the first strong experimental link between superfluidity in ultracold Fermi gases and superconductivity in metals. What’s more, this feat was accomplished with photoemission spectroscopy, a tried-and-true technique that has been used for more than 100 years to study solids. This technique has been instrumental in revealing the properties of superconductors....
What happens to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) when its atoms interact strongly? One possibility for large attractive interactions is that the condensate shrinks and then explodes, as the Cornell and Wieman groups discovered in 2001. Another possibility for large repulsive interactions is behavior analogous to that of superfluid liquid helium. If superfluid liquid heliumlike dynamics could...
When the Jin and Ye group collaboration wanted to investigate the creation of stable ultracold polar molecules, the researchers initially decided to make ultracold KRb (potassium-rubidium) molecules and then study their collision behavior. Making the molecules required a cloud of incredibly cold K and Rb atoms, the ability to apply a magnetic field of just the right strength to induce a...
A second wave has appeared on the horizon of ultracold atom research. Known as the p-wave, it is opening the door to probing rich new physics, including unexplored quantum phase transitions. The first wave of ultracold atom research focused on s-wave pairing between atoms, where the “s” meant the resultant molecules are not rotating. In contrast, p-waves involve higher-order...
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.
Jin says that many of us might expect...
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...
Markus Greiner, Cindy Regal, Jayson Stewart, and Debbie Jin have found the first-ever visual evidence of correlated ultracold atoms in the noise patterns present in images of an ultracold cloud of potassium.
The researchers split ultracold molecules into entangled pairs of atoms flying apart in opposite directions, as shown to the right. Then they used a laser beam to create a...
Dr. Deborah Jin was awarded the Science and Environment Medal on September 28, 2004. Jin created a new form of matter which could potentially unlock the key to superconductivity, a phenomenon with the potential to improve energy efficiency dramatically across a broad range of applications.
