������ý����

The coronavirus pandemic upended schools in the spring of 2020, sending students and faculty home. This rapidly changed how instructors handled laboratory physics courses. With a NSF RAPID grant, JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski asked instructors what worked—and what didn't—as they moved their lab courses online.

Famous thought experiment Schrödinger’s Cat posits that a quantum system can be in two opposing states simultaneously—a specific type of superposition. Creating cat states in a large number of atoms has been difficult for physicists. The Rey Theory Group has developed a new means of preparing these cat states in the state-of-the-art strontium optical atomic clock. Cat states could in turn improve the sensitivity of the clock beyond what is possible with independent atoms.

JILA Fellow Cindy Regal has been selected as the 2020 recipient of Research Corporation for Science Advancement’s Cottrell Frontiers in Research Excellence and Discovery (FRED) Award. The $250,000 FRED Award recognizes and rewards innovative research that could transform an area of science.

Cooling and trapping atoms has helped scientists advance their understanding of atomic and quantum physics over several decades. Now it’s time to move on to more complex systems, like molecules. But molecules have proven tricky to cool and trap efficiently. A new study from the Ye Lab has found a way to cool yttrium monoxide robustly and efficiently, which will allow them to study how they interact with each other in the quantum regime.

Scientists understand the rules of equilibrium systems well, but non-equilibrium systems are still a mystery. JILA's Thompson Laboratory and Rey Theory Group collaborated to study how new types of phases of matter emerge in a non-equilibrium system made of atoms and light. This reveals brand new insights into organization principles in out-of-equilibrium matter, and could shed light on how complex systems like black holes behave.

The Office of Naval Research program rewards early career scientists “who show exceptional promise for doing creative research”—and JILA's Adam Kaufman's work with optical tweezers has earned that recognition.

All atoms, molecules and materials are held together by a web of interactions between electrons and ions. In materials, tiny vibrations called phonons cause the positions of the ions to oscillate. How those phonons and electrons are coupled—or interact—determines a material’s properties. The Kapetyn-Murnane Group found that by using ultrafast laser pulses to excite the material, they can precisely study the interaction between electrons and the most important phonons in tantalum diselenide (1T-TaSe2)—and also manipulate it.

Our mobile communication networks are known as multiple access channels or MACS. Through this system, multiple users send data to a single tower, which then relays information to the correct receivers. These MACs have a fundamental limit on how much data they can handle. Through mathematical logic games, the Graeme Smith Group found that quantum entanglement could boost that fundamental limit.

Computer chips can’t get much smaller, but they can get faster. That means moving electrons around more quickly. To speed up computers and possibly enable other technologies, scientists want to use light to drive electric currents. The Nesbitt Lab studied gold nanostars and found a way to optically control currents at the nanoscale.

Fluorescence and dyes are great tools to study cells, proteins, bacteria, or DNA. But scientists need to efficiently sort out the glowing material from the non-glowing stuff in their samples. The Jimenez Lab and the JILA Electronics Shop teamed up to create an improved flow cytometry system which can not only sort fluorescent material faster, it can sort by fluorescence lifetime and brightness faster than a commercially available system.