Atomic & Molecular Physics
JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Jun Ye has been awarded a prestigious 2025 AB Nexus seed grant for his pioneering work in quantum sensing technologies.
The first Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) was first created by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, Mike Anderson, Jason Ensher, and Michael Matthews on June 5, 1995 in JILA at the University of Colorado Boulder. This new state of matter was first predicted 70 years earlier. Satyendra Nath Bose first described the quantum statistics of what we now call bosons, and Albert Einstein extended the theory to show that non-interacting bosons could condense into a single macroscopic quantum state at low temperature.
In a new study, physicists at JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder have used a cloud of atoms chilled down to incredibly cold temperatures to simultaneously measure acceleration in three dimensions—a feat that many scientists didn’t think was possible.
Our work on high optical access cryogenic system for Rydberg atoms has been published in PRX Quantum - see this viewpoint on our studies.
Professor Cindy Regal, Baur-SPIE Chair at JILA, has been named a 2025 Brown Investigator by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech.
In a thrilling display of scientific communication and creativity, Thi Hoang, a graduate student at JILA, emerged victorious at the inaugural Quantum Science Slam held during the CLEO 2025 conference. This new event, designed to bring cutting-edge science to life for a broader audience, saw participants deliver engaging and entertaining 10-minute presentations on their research.
We used features of alkaline-earth atoms to enhance the timescale coherent many-body physics using Rydberg-dressing, which enables studies of quantum magnetism and the creation of metrologically-useful entanglement. See the paper here.
Researchers at JILA, led by Ana Maria Rey, developed a new protocol for teleporting quantum information in collective spin states of ions within a two-dimensional crystal. This involves entangling ion groups through phonon modes and using measurements to transfer quantum states. The protocol, successfully simulated with up to 300 ions, shows potential for quantum networks and distributed quantum sensing.
For decades, atomic clocks have been the pinnacle of precision timekeeping, enabling GPS navigation, cutting-edge physics research, and tests of fundamental theories. But researchers at JILA, led by JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Jun Ye, in collaboration with the Technical University of Vienna, are pushing beyond atomic transitions to something potentially even more stable: a nuclear clock. This clock could revolutionize timekeeping by using a uniquely low-energy transition within the nucleus of a thorium-229 atom. This transition is less sensitive to environmental disturbances than modern atomic clocks and has been proposed for tests of fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model.
In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Cindy Regal, along with former JILA Associate Fellow Jose D’Incao (currently an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston) and their teams developed new experimental and theoretical techniques for studying the rates at which light-assisted collisions occur in the presence of small atomic energy splittings. Their results rely upon optical tweezers—focused lasers capable of trapping individual atoms—that the team used to isolate and study the products of individual pairs of atoms.