STROBE
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鈥攕uch as nanowires and nanomeshes鈥攖hat 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, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 because they exhibit new spin and electronic physical phenomena and have much promise to build new miniaturized photonic or semiconductor nanoscale devices.鈥 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.
JILA Fellow and University of Colorado physics professor Heather Lewandowski helped lead a group of more than 1,000 undergraduate students in a study looking at the temperatures of the Sun's corona. The corona, the outer layer, gets incredibly hot, and the study hoped to figure out why. Their research was featured in Popular Science Magazine,聽revealing the creativity and ingenuity of undergraduate students in scientific research.
Some of the most important research and discoveries in science have been made by women. To celebrate these inspiring individuals and to support the next generation of female scientists, the United Nations dedicated February 11 as "International Women and Girls in Science" day. To honor this tradition, JILA hosted a panel discussion/open-forum with both JILA Fellows and JILA staff as speakers.
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.
JILA Fellow Margaret Murnane has been selected as a recipient of the 2022 Institute of Physics Isaac Newton Medal and Prize. This prestigious award honors the legacy of the famous physicist Sir Isaac Newton, by commending those who have made world-leading contributions in the field of physics.聽Murnane received the award for pioneering and sustained contributions to the development of ultrafast lasers and coherent X-ray sources and the use of such聽sources to understand the quantum nature of materials.
A collaboration led by Dr. Liao and other researchers, including JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, worked out a method to image and better analyze ST-OAM beams.
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鈥檙e diving into a previously-hidden realm鈥攆ar wilder than anything van Leeuwenhoek, known as the 鈥渇ather of microbiology,鈥 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鈥檚. 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.
Functional materials鈥攍ike molecular electronics, biomaterials, light-emitting diodes, or new photovoltaic materials鈥攇ain their electronic or photonic properties from complex and multifaceted interactions occurring at the elementary scales of their atomic or molecular constituents. In addition, the ability to control the functions of these materials through external stimuli , e.g., in the form of strong optical excitations, enables new properties in the materials, making them appealing for new technological applications. However, a major obstacle to overcome is the combination of the very fast time (billionths of a second) scales and the very small spatial (nanometer) scales which define the many-body interactions of the elementary excitations in the material which define its function. The extremely high time and spatial resolutions needed have been extremely difficult to achieve simultaneously. Many physicists have, therefore, struggled to visualize the interactions within these materials. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, JILA Fellow Markus Raschke and his team report on a new ultrafast imaging technique that could solve this issue.