���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������

The DoD announced today the selection of nine distinguished faculty scientists and engineers for the 2022 Class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows (VBFF). This highly competitive Fellowship is named in honor of Dr. Vannevar Bush, who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development after World War II. In line with Dr. Bush’s vision, the Fellowship aims to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research.

“The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship is the Department’s most prestigious research grant award,” said Dr. Jean-Luc Cambier, the VBFF Program Director. “It is oriented towards bold and ambitious ‘blue sky’ research that will lead to extraordinary outcomes that may revolutionize entire disciplines, create entirely new fields, or disrupt accepted theories and perspectives.” JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye has been distinguished as one of the 2022 Fellows.

This year, JILA celebrates its 60th anniversary. Officially established on April 13, 1962, as a joint institution between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), JILA has become a world leader in physics research. Its rich history includes three Nobel laureates, groundbreaking work in laser development, atomic clocks, underlying dedication to precision measurement, and even competitive sports leagues. The process of creating this science goliath was not always straightforward and took the dedication and hard work of many individuals.

More than 400 years later, scientists are in the midst of an equally-important revolution. They’re diving into a previously-hidden realm—far wilder than anything van Leeuwenhoek, known as the “father of microbiology,” could have imagined. Some researchers, like physicists Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, are exploring this world of even tinier things with microscopes that are many times more precise than the Dutch scientist’s. Others, like Jun Ye, are using lasers to cool clouds of atoms to just a millionth of a degree above absolute zero with the goal of collecting better measurements of natural phenomena.

For JILA and NIST Fellows Ana Maria Rey and Jun Ye, one type of phenomena they are especially interested in observing are the interactions between light and atoms, especially those at the heart of the decay of an atom prepared in the excited state. Ye’s and Rey’s groups collaborated in a joint study, and were able to find an appropriate experimental setting where they were able to observe Pauli blocking of spontaneous emission by direct measurements of the excited state population.

Worldwide, many researchers are interested in controlling atomic and molecular interactions. This includes JILA and NIST fellows Jun Ye and Ana Maria Rey, both of whom have spent years researching interacting potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules, which were originally created in a collaboration between Ye and the late Deborah Jin. In the newest collaboration between the experimental (Ye) and theory (Rey) groups, the researchers have developed a new way to control two-dimensional gaseous layers of molecules, publishing their exciting new results in the journal Science.

JILA physicists have measured Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, or more specifically, the effect called time dilation, at the smallest scale ever, showing that two tiny atomic clocks, separated by just a millimeter or the width of a sharp pencil tip, tick at different rates. The experiments, described in the Feb. 17 issue of Nature, suggest how to make atomic clocks 50 times more precise than today’s best designs and offer a route to perhaps revealing how relativity and gravity interact with quantum mechanics, a major quandary in physics.

U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse got a first-hand look at the future of ultrafast lasers, record-setting clocks, and quantum computers on the ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ campus. Neguse visited the university Thursday to tour facilities at JILA, a research partnership between ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye has been awarded the 2022 Herbert-Walther-Award from the German Physical Society and OPTICA (formerly OSA). This award recognizes distinguished contributions in quantum optics and atomic physics as well as leadership in the international scientific community.

How atoms interact with light reflects some of the most basic principles in physics. On a quantum level, how atoms and light interact has been a topic of interest in the worldwide scientific community for many years. Light scattering is a process where incoming light excites an atom to a higher-lying energy state from which it subsequently decays back to its ground state by reemitting a quantum of light. In the quantum realm, there are many factors that affect light scattering. In a new paper published in Science, JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye and his laboratory members report on how light scattering is affected by the quantum nature of the atoms, more specifically, thequantum statistical rule such as the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye has been named a 2021 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. This means that Ye is one of the 0.1%, of the world's researchers who receive this title. Clarivate™ is a data analytics company that identifies the world’s most influential researchers ─ the select few who have been most frequently cited by their peers over the last decade. Ye’s many published papers over the last year have been ranked in the top 1% by citations for field and year in the Web of Science™, according to Clarivate. Well done Dr. Ye!