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In a new ACS Nano paper, JILA and NIST Fellow David Nesbitt, along with former graduate student Jacob Pettine and other collaborators, developed a new method for measuring the dynamics of specific particles known as “hot carriers,” as a function of both time and energy, unveiling detailed information that can be used to improve collection efficiencies.

To understand how EDTA binds to metal ions and water molecules, Madison Foreman, a former JILA graduate student in the Weber group, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Terry, and their supervisor, JILA Fellow J. Mathias Weber, studied the geometry of the EDTA binding site using a unique method that helped to isolate the molecules and their bound ions, allowing for more in-depth analyses of the binding interactions. They published a series of three papers on this topic. In their first paper, published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, they found that the size of the metal ion changes where it sits in the EDTA binding site, which affects other binding interactions, especially with water.

Some of the biggest questions about our universe may be solved by scientists using its tiniest particles. Since the 1960s, physicists have been looking at particle interactions to understand an observed imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe. Much of the work has focused on interactions that violate charge and parity (CP) symmetry. This symmetry refers to a lack of change in our universe if all particles’ charges and orientations were inverted. “This charge and parity symmetry is the symmetry that high-energy physicists say needs to be violated to result in this imbalance between matter and antimatter,” explained JILA research associate Luke Caldwell. To try to find evidence of this violation of CP symmetry, JILA and NIST Fellows Jun Ye and Eric Cornell, and their teams, including Caldwell, collaborated to measure the electron electric dipole moment (eEDM), which is often used as a proxy measure for the CP symmetry violation. The eEDM is an asymmetric distortion of the electron’s charge distribution along the axis of its spin. To try to measure this distortion, the researchers used a complex setup of lasers and a novel ion trap. Their results, published in Science as the cover story and Physical Review A, leveraged a longer experiment time to improve the precision measurement by a factor of 2.4, setting new records.

To better understand heat transport at the nanoscale, JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane, Henry Kapteyn, and their research groups within the STROBE NSF Center, JILA, and the University of Colorado Boulder, created the first general analytical theory of nanoscale-confined heat transport, that can be used to engineer heat transport in 3D nanosystems—such as nanowires and nanomeshes—that are of great interest for next-generation energy-efficient devices. This discovery was published in NanoLetters.

Two-dimensional materials, like graphene and 2D semiconductors, are an area of physics that has been growing tremendously in the last decade. According to JILA graduate student Ben Whetten, “That’s because they exhibit new spin and electronic physical phenomena and have much promise to build new miniaturized photonic or semiconductor nanoscale devices.” Researchers like Whetten, and his advisor, JILA Fellow, and University of Colorado Boulder professor Markus Raschke, develop methods to image these materials, giving a better understanding of their inner workings. In a new paper in NanoLetters, Raschke, and his team extended their ultrafast microscope to see nanometer-sized imperfection(s) within a 2D semiconductor sample that created some surprising nonlinear optical effects.

To better understand the dynamics of aptamer and ligand binding, Marton Menendez, along with JILA and NIST Fellow David Nesbitt, looked at the lysine (an amino acid) riboswitch in Bacillus subtilis, a common type of bacterium present in environments ranging from cow stomachs to deep sea hydrothermal vents. With this model organism, the researchers studied how different secondary ligands, like, potassium, cesium, and sodium, affect riboswitch activation, or its physical folding.

A new approach recently described in Physical Review Letters explores a new way to generate squeezing that is exponentially faster than previous experiments and generates a new flavor of entanglement: two-mode squeezing—a type of entanglement that is thought to be used for improving the best atomic clocks and for sensing how gravity changes the flow of time. This promising new approach was developed by a collaboration of JILA and NIST Fellows Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson, and their team members, along with Bhuvanesh Sundar, a former postdoctoral researcher at JILA now at Rigetti Computing, and former JILA research associate Dr. Robert Lewis-Swan, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma.

For a new study, a team of physicists recruited roughly 1,000 undergraduate students at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ to help answer one of the most enduring questions about the sun: How does the star’s outermost atmosphere, or “corona,” get so hot?

The research represents a nearly-unprecedented feat of data analysis: From 2020 to 2022, the small army of mostly first- and second-year students examined the physics of more than 600 real solar flares—gigantic eruptions of energy from the sun’s roiling corona.

The researchers, partially lead by JILA fellow Heather Lewandowski, and including 995 undergraduate and graduate students, published their finding May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. The results suggest that solar flares may not be responsible for superheating the sun’s corona, as a popular theory in astrophysics suggests.

Dipolar gases have become an increasingly important topic in the field of quantum physics in recent years. These gases consist of atoms or molecules that possess a non-zero electric dipole moment, which gives rise to long-range dipole-dipole interactions between particles. These interactions can lead to a variety of interesting and exotic quantum phenomena that are not observed in conventional gases.

For decades, black holes have fascinated scientists and nonscientists alike. Their ominous voids, like an open pair of jaws, has inspired a whole wave of science-fiction featuring the phenomenon. Physicists have also been similarly inspired, specifically to understand the dynamics of what is happening inside of the black hole, especially for objects that may fall in.