News

Shimon Kolkowitz, a former JILA research associate, won the 2019 Packard Fellowship.

NIST NRC postdoctoral fellow in the Ye Group won the poster competition at a recent conference.

Thinh Bui, a postdoctoral researcher in Jun Ye's group, won an early career prize from the journal Molecular Physics.

Delegates from the University of Colorado Boulder went to Washington, D.C. to discuss the CUBit Quantum Initiative.

Marit Fiechter, an undergraduate at the University of Groningen and former JILA student, won the SPIN prize for best undergraduate thesis project.

CU Boulder student and JILA undergraduate researcher Anna McAuliffe won the poster competition at the 2019 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics held at Utah State University.

McAuliffe’s poster detailed the build and installation of a cryogenic hexapole designed to mitigate clog issues in an OH decelerator. This work was the latest effort of researchers working under JILA Fellow Jun Ye to increase the density of the molecular beam.

JILA Fellows Jun Ye and Deborah Jin (1968 to 2016) have been named Highly Cited Researchers for 2018 by Clarivate Analytics.The list of Highly Cited Researchers, published annually since 2014, recognizes scientists across the world who have demonstrated significant influence through publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade.

The American Physical Society announced JILA Fellow Jun Ye as the recipient of the 2019 Norman F. Ramsey Prize in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, and in Precision Tests of Fundamental Laws and Symmetries. Ye was recognized for his ground-breaking contributions to precision measurements and the quantum control of atomic and molecular systems, including atomic clocks.

Former JILAn Dr. Sara Campbell won the 2018 American Physical Society’s Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award for her doctoral work on the world’s most precise atomic clock. Campbell’s thesis, entitled “A Fermi-degenerate three-dimensional optical lattice clock”, detailed how the high densities of a degenerate Fermi gas held in an optical lattice could be used to prevent interaction shifts. In this thesis, Campbell demonstrated an unprecedented level of atom-light coherence.

Sara Campbell was a JILA graduate student in the Ye group  until May 2017. She is now studying phase contrast electron microscopy as a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley. Earlier this month, Campbell was named a HHMI Hannah Gray Fellow. 

Recent JILA graduate Dr. Sara Campbell was announced to be a 2018 HHMI Hanna Gray Fellows.

JILA Jun Ye hit the big screen this summer as he debuted in the feature-length documentary, “The Most Unknown”.

“The Most Unknown” brings together nine scientists from across the globe, all of whom are using science to answer deep philosophical questions, such as how did life begin, and what is time? The scientists are brought together, (“blind-date style,” as the New Yorker’s review accurately describes it) to discuss how their work from various fields might overlap.

Former JILA graduate student Dr. Sara Cambell has been named a Finalist for the 2018 American Physical Society’s Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award for her doctoral work on Fermi-degenerate three-dimensional optical lattice clock. 

JILA graduate student John Robinson won the Student Paper Competition at the 2018 IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (IFCS). Finalists for the Student Paper Competition were selected by abstracts, and final judgements were based on poster presentations.

JILA Fellow Jun Ye was named the 2018 winner of the I. I. Rabi Award by the IEEE Frequency Control Symposium. Ye was recognized “for the development of stabile, reproducible, and accurate atomic clocks based on optical lattices, and the use of those clocks to probe fundamental atomic interactions and quantum many-body systems.”

The Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on November 29, 2017 the election of JILA Fellow Jun Ye as a Foreign Member, China’s highest honor for foreign scientists: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) promotes scientific and technological advances across the world. CAS includes a network of more than 100 research and development organizations across the world; three universities; and a traditional merit-based academy analogous to the US National Academy of Sciences to recognize and convene scientific leaders from across the world.

Leah Dodson won the Miller Prize at the 72nd International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, held June 19–23 in Urbana, Illinois. Dodson is an NRC postdoc whose official advisor is Jun Ye, but who primarily works on molecular spectroscopy in the Mathias Weber lab. Her award-winning talk was entitled “Oxalate Formation in Titanium––Carbon Dioxide Anionic Clusters Studied by Infrared Photodissociation Spectroscopy.”

Bryce Bjork’s talk entitled “Direct Measurement of OD+CO-> cis-DOCO, trans-DOCO, and D+CO₂ Branching Kinetics using Time-Resolved Frequency Comb Spectroscopy” was selected by a panel of judges at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy as one of three winners of the 2017 Rao Prize. The prize will be presented to Bjork at the June 2018 Symposium.

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 110 people in the physics category in this year's list.

NRC Postdoc Ed Marti received an Outstanding Presentation Award for his presentation of the poster "Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermions in an Optical Clock" at the 2016  Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium held on July 20. This recognition was shared with NRC Postdoc Shimon Kolkowitz, who originally submitted the abstract as well as prepared the poster and a two-minute–two-slide synopsis of the work. Marti did a great job with both the oral and poster presentations even though he had just one day's notice after family matters kept Dr Kolkowitz from participating in the conference.

President Obama has selected JILA Fellow Jun Ye of NIST's Quantum Physics Division to receive a 2015 Presidential Rank Award. The award cited Ye's work advancing "the frontier of light-matter interaction and focusing on precision measurement, quantum physics and ultracold matter, optical frequency metrology, and ultrafast science."