Research Highlights
JILA researchers have upgraded a breathalyzer based on Nobel Prize-winning frequency-comb technology and combined it with machine learning to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection in 170 volunteer subjects with excellent accuracy. Their achievement represents the first real-world test of the technology鈥檚 capability to diagnose disease in exhaled human breath.
JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey collaborated with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Ion Storage Group leader John Bollinger, and researchers at the University of Innsbruck, Rutgers University and the University of Colorado Boulder, to design a trapped-ion simulator for 2D p-wave superconductors. Their work paves a way for clean observations of the predicted non-equilibrium dynamics in future experiments using the trapped-ion simulator, or Penning trap.
Quantum gases of interacting molecules can exhibit unique dynamics. JILA and NIST Physicist Jun Ye has spent years of research to reveal, probe, and control these dynamics with potassium-rubidium molecules. In a new article published in Nature, Ye and his team of researchers describe having combined two threads of previous research鈥攕pin and motional dynamics鈥攖o reveal rich many-body and collisional physics that are controllable in the laboratory.
Chen-Ting Liao and the Kapteyn-Murnane group from JILA have developed and implemented a new method to use x-ray beams to capture the 3D magnetic texture in a material with very high 10-nanometer spatial resolution for the first time. They published their new technique and new scientific findings in Nature Nanotechnology.
When it comes to creating ever more intriguing quantum systems, a constant need is finding new ways to observe them in a wide range of physical scenarios. JILA Fellow Cindy Regal and JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey have teamed up with Oriol Romero-Isart, a professor at the University of Innsbruck and IQOQI (Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information) to show that a trapped particle in the form of an atom readily reveals its full quantum state with quite simple ingredients, opening up opportunities for studies of the quantum state of ever larger particles.
There are many methods to determine what the limits are for certain processes. Many of these methods look to reach the upper and lower bounds to identify them for making accurate measurements and calculations. In the growing field of quantum sensing, these limits have yet to be found. That may change, thanks to research done by JILA Fellow Graeme Smith and his research team, with JILA and NIST Fellow James Thompson In a new study published in Physical Review Applied, the JILA and NIST researchers collaborated with scientists at the quantum company Quantinuum (previously Honeywell Quantum Solutions) to try and identify the upper limits of quantum sensing.
JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and her group, together with JILA theorist Jose D鈥橧ncao, collaborated with the University of Toronto experimentalist team led by Joseph Thywissen. They devised a method to isolate pairs of atoms in an optical lattice, a web of laser light that helps isolate and control particle interactions, then gave the particles the necessary angular momentum, or twist, for the atoms to collide via p-wave using specific laser beam frequencies. This resulted in the first observation of p-wave interactions in an experiment.
Sitting 150 million kilometers away from the Earth, the Sun produces puzzling phenomena, like solar flares, that physicists are working to understand. One of these puzzles involves the Sun's tachocline, a belt of heat transition. Before leaving JILA to become a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, Matilsky collaborated with JILA Fellow Juri Toomre and his group at JILA to study the Sun's tachocline using computer simulations.
JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson鈥檚 team of researchers have for the first time successfully combined two of the 鈥渟pookiest鈥 features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms.
In a new paper published in PRX Quantum, Rey and her team of researchers proposed a new method for seeing the quantum effects enabled by SU(n) symmetry in current experimental conditions, something that has been historically challenging for physicists.