Precision Measurement
JILA Fellow Jun Ye has been elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation鈥檚 oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. His election recognizes his extraordinary contributions to physics and quantum science, including pioneering advances in optical atomic clocks, precision measurement, and quantum many-body physics.
JILA Fellow Jun Ye has been elected a corresponding member abroad of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (脰sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, OeAW), recognizing his internationally influential contributions to physics and quantum science. Election to the OeAW honors scholars whose work has had a profound impact well beyond Austria and reflects exceptional standing within the global research community.
Researchers at JILA propose a new superradiant laser design for next-generation 鈥渁ctive鈥 atomic clocks that eliminates atom-heating and vibration sensitivity, two major obstacles that have limited precision and practicality. By carefully guiding atoms through a controlled loop of quantum states, the approach could enable compact, robust atomic鈥攁nd potentially nuclear鈥攃locks that maintain extreme accuracy even under physical disturbances.
JILA graduate student Anya Grafov, a member of the Kapteyn鈥慚urnane Group, has been selected as one of just 16 global recipients of the 2026 Zonta International Women in STEM Award, which recognizes exceptional early鈥慶areer women advancing research and innovation in STEM fields worldwide. The award honors Grafov鈥檚 work in ultrafast magnetism and her commitment to fostering more inclusive and equitable scientific communities.
In quantum metrology, it has been considered for some time whether quantum error correction can be used to enhance precision measurements. Here, the primary challenge is devising codes ad protocols that correct noise while not correcting the unknown signal being sensed. In this collaboration with the Pichler, we identify some promising conditions for leveraging quantum error correction for enhanced sensing, even when signal and noise couple identically to sensor qubits.
Drum-like membrane resonators are intriguing for precision sensing because their resonance frequencies can be sensitive to a variety of parameters of interest, from mass to thermal radiation. The quest for improved sensitivity in tensioned membranes faces a tradeoff in which a high amplitude of mechanical motion improves signal-to-noise, but too high of a drive (beyond the so-called critical amplitude) introduces nonlinear effects.
In our work published in NanoLetters, we develop an experimentally straightforward method to evade this tradeoff. Using a patterned, trampoline-shaped membrane, we find that dual-mechanical-mode operation can bring these sensors to a thermally-limited frequency stability.听 By measuring and correcting for frequency noise arising at high amplitude, we maintain this high stability when operating beyond the linear regime, opening new opportunities for membrane frequency sensing.
Physicists at 蜜桃传媒破解版下载 have demonstrated a new kind of vacuum ultraviolet laser that could one day allow scientists to observe phenomena currently out of reach for the most powerful microscopes.
The new laser could allow researchers to follow fuel molecules in real time as they undergo combustion, spot incredibly small defects in nanoelectronics, track time with unprecedented precision and more.
The JILA team will present its preliminary findings on March 17 and March 19 at the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit in Denver.
JILA researchers, working with collaborators in Germany, demonstrated that new crystalline mirror coatings dramatically reduce atomic-level noise in optical cavities, enabling lasers with record鈥慴reaking frequency stability. By outperforming traditional coatings by a factor of four, these mirrors open the door to more precise experiments and future advances in technologies such as atomic clocks and gravitational鈥憌ave detection.
JILA researchers have taken a major step toward realizing next鈥慻eneration nuclear clocks by studying how thorium鈥慸oped crystals behave over time. In new experiments published in Nature, the team tracked the stability, temperature response, and reproducibility of three calcium鈥慺luoride crystals containing different concentrations of thorium. Over nearly a year of measurements, all three crystals demonstrated remarkably stable nuclear transition frequencies鈥攁n essential requirement for building reliable nuclear clocks.
For the past several years, an experimental research group led by听JILA Fellow James Thompson and a theoretical research group led by JILA Fellow Ana Maria Rey have been working together to study quantum interactions using cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED)鈥攖he science of how light contained in reflective cavities interacts with quantum particles, like individual atoms. Recently, they tackled many-body interactions with a new experiment, described in an article published in the journal Science. In the experiment, they successfully created interactions that require the participation of either three or four atoms to achieve the observed results.