Atomic & Molecular Physics
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.
Gravimetry, or the measurement of the strength of a gravitational field (or gravitational acceleration), has been of great interest to physicists since the 1600s. One of the most precise ways to measure gravitational acceleration is to use an atom interferometer. There are many different types of atom interferometers but so far all operate using uncorrelated atoms that are not entangled. To build the best one allowed in nature, it requires harnessing the power of quantum entanglement. However, making a quantum interferometer with entangled atoms is challenging. JILA Fellows Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson have published a paper in Physical Review Letters that discusses a new protocol that could make entangled quantum interferometers easier to produce and use.
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鈩 is a data analytics company that identifies the world鈥檚 most influential researchers 鈹 the select few who have been most frequently cited by their peers over the last decade. Ye鈥檚 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鈩, according to Clarivate. Well done Dr. Ye!
JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye has been awarded the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honor for 2021. This award was established in 2010 to mark the 125th anniversary of Niels Bohr鈥檚 birth. The medal is awarded annually to a particularly outstanding researcher who is working in international cooperation and exchange of knowledge, two qualities exemplified by Bohr himself.
JILA Fellow Andreas Becker is one of the 11 University of Colorado Boulder faculty to be awarded a 2021 Distinguished Professor title. CU Distinguished Professors are tenured faculty members who give outstanding work in research or creative work and have a reputation of excellence in promoting learning and student engagement in the research process as well as dedicated to the profession, the university, and its affiliates.
Breath analysis has been fast progressing in recent years and is continuing to gain more and more research interest. It is, however, experimentally challenging due to the extremely low concentrations of molecules present in each breath, limited number of detectable molecular species, and the long data-analysis time required. Now, a JILA-based collaboration between the labs of NIST Fellows Jun Ye and David Nesbitt has resulted in a more robust and precise breath-testing apparatus. In combining a special type of laser with a mirrored cavity, the team of researchers was able to precisely measure four molecules in human breath at unprecedented sensitivity levels, with the promise of measuring many more types of molecules.
In a new paper published in Nano Letters, JILA Fellow Markus Raschke and graduate student Thomas Gray describe how they developed a way to image and visualize how surface molecules couple and interact with quantum precision. The team believes that their nanospectroscopy method could be used for molecular engineering to develop better molecular surfaces, with controlled properties for molecular electronic, photonic, or biomedical applications.- Our paper on high power light sources at magic wavelengths for neutral atom optical atomic clocks is published in RSI!聽https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0057619
Jun Ye, fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and professor adjoint of physics at 蜜桃传媒破解版下载, has been awarded the 2022聽Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics聽for his pioneering research on atomic clocks. Ye has been a physicist at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and 蜜桃传媒破解版下载, for more than 20 years.
The basic question of how strands of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) fold and hybridize has been studied thoroughly by biophysicists around the globe. In particular, there can be unexpected challenges in obtaining accurate kinetic data when studying the physics of how DNA and RNA fold and unfold at the single molecule level. One problem comes from temporal camera blur, as the cameras used to capture single聽photons emitted by these molecules do so in a finite time window that can blur the image and thereby skew the kinetics. In a paper published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B, JILA Fellow David Nesbitt, and first author David Nicholson, propose an extremely simple yet broadly effective way to overcome this camera blur.