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The strange behaviors of high-temperature superconductors—materials that conduct electricity without resistance above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen—and other systems with unusual magnetic properties have fascinated scientists for decades. While researchers have developed mathematical models for these systems, much of the underlying quantum dynamics and phases remain a mystery because of the immense computational difficulty of solving these models.

On July 3, 2024, Colorado Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo delved into the quantum realm during her first official visit to ]JILA, a joint institute established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder's Department of Physics proudly announce two 2024 Physics Department Teaching Award recipients: JILA Fellow and NIST Fellow and Professor Eric Cornell and JILA Fellow and�� Professor John Bohn. These awards recognize their exceptional dedication to teaching and their profound impact on students at different levels of their academic journey.

Since its inception in 1962, JILA has been a vital part of the University of Colorado’s physics research department, leading the way in the science of precision measurement while also teaching the next generation of physicists. Congressman Neguse recently released an update on funds for JILA provided by the Community Project Funding (PCF) status, saying: “Colorado has become world-renowned for its research ecosystem, and I could not be more excited that we’ve secured funding to help support the development of these groundbreaking labs in Colorado’s Second District. Thanks to this funding, JILA researchers and scientists will be able to complete much needed renovations to their lab—equipping this facility with the tools needed to remain a leader in their field.”

Dipolar gases have become an increasingly important topic in the field of quantum physics in recent years. These gases consist of atoms or molecules that possess a non-zero electric dipole moment, which gives rise to long-range dipole-dipole interactions between particles. These interactions can lead to a variety of interesting and exotic quantum phenomena that are not observed in conventional gases.

One of the major strengths of JILA are the frequent and ongoing collaborations between experimentalists and theorists, which have led to incredible discoveries in physics. One of these partnerships is between JILA Fellow John Bohn and JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye. Bohn's team of theorists has partnered with Ye's experimentalist laboratory for nearly twenty years, from the very beginning of Ye’s cold molecule research when he became a JILA Fellow. Recently in their collaborations, the researchers have been studying a three-dimensional molecular gas made of 40K87Rb molecules. In a paper published in Nature Physics, the combined team illustrated new quantum mechanical tricks in making this gas unreactive, thus enjoying a long life (for a gas), while at the same time letting the molecules in the gas interact and socialize (thermalize) with each other.

The Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) has been studied for decades, ever since its prediction by scientists Satyandra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein nearly 100 years ago. The BEC is a gas of atoms cooled to almost absolute zero. At low enough temperatures, quantum mechanics allows the locations of the atoms in the BEC to be uncertain to the extent that they can’t be located individually in the gas. The BEC has a special history with JILA, as it was at JILA that the first gaseous condensate was produced in 1995 by JILA Fellows Eric Cornell (NIST) and Carl Wieman (University of Colorado Boulder).��Since 2005, research on dipolar BEC has continued, using different theories to describe the droplet’s interactions. In a paper recently published in��Physical Review A, first author, and graduate student, Eli Halperin and JILA fellow John Bohn theorize a way to study the BEC using a hyperspherical approach. While the name may sound intimidating, the hyperspherical approach is simply a systematic way to look at a many-body problem. The many body problem refers to a large category of problems regarding microscopic systems with interacting particles. Bohn and Halperin applied this approach to a dipolar BEC specifically.

Researchers at JILA and around the world are starting a grand adventure of precisely controlling the internal and external quantum states of ultracold molecules after years of intense experimental and theoretical study. Such control of small molecules, which are the most complex quantum systems that can currently be completely understood from the principles of quantum mechanics, will allow researchers to probe the quantum interactions of individual molecules with other molecules, investigate what happens to molecules during collisions, and study how molecules behave in chemical reactions.