Heather Lewandowski

JILA Researcher Megan Bentley Named Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow

Steven Burrows — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:55:00 +0000

JILA Researcher Megan Bentley Named Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow Steven Burrows Thu, 04/02/2026 - 11:55

Steven Burrows / JILA Science Communications Manager

JILA postdoctoral researcher Dr. Megan Bentley, a member of Heather Lewandowski’s research group, has been awarded a 2026 Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. The prestigious national fellowship recognizes outstanding early career scientists pursuing innovative research in the chemical sciences.

Bentley was selected as one of 18 fellows nationwide in the 2026 cohort following a highly competitive, multi stage review process led by a panel of scientific experts. Fellows are chosen for both the originality of their research and their potential to transition from mentored postdoctoral work to independent scientific leadership.

In the Lewandowski group at JILA, Bentley’s research focuses on experimental atomic, molecular, and optical physics, with close connections to fundamental chemical physics. Her work aligns with the Beckman Foundation’s mission to support foundational scientific research that advances experimental methods and deepens understanding of the physical world.

The Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship supports advanced research in core areas of chemistry, including chemical physics and related instrumentation. The award provides multi year funding for salary and research expenses and is designed to accelerate the professional development of exceptional postdoctoral researchers.

Bentley’s selection highlights both her individual research accomplishments and JILA’s strength as a home for interdisciplinary, early career science at the interface of physics and chemistry.

JILA postdoctoral researcher Dr. Megan Bentley, a member of Heather Lewandowski’s research group, has been named a 2026 Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow. The prestigious national award recognizes Bentley’s innovative research and supports outstanding early‑career scientists in the chemical sciences as they transition toward independent research careers.

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JILA Researchers Overturn 25-Year-Old Explanation of Benzene Formation in Space

Steven Burrows — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:21:00 +0000

JILA Researchers Overturn 25-Year-Old Explanation of Benzene Formation in Space Steven Burrows Fri, 01/09/2026 - 11:21

Bailey Bedford / Freelance Science Communicator

Interstellar formation of PAHs terminates at C6H5+. Image credit: Steven Burrows / JILA

Space is famously empty. The cold vacuum of space—or more specifically, the interstellar medium—lacks much of anything, including the air needed to conduct sound. But it isn’t quite completely empty. While it’s vacant compared to what we experience in daily life, there are occasional atoms and molecules spread throughout it.

Those atoms and molecules mean that there is chemistry in space, although it doesn’t always resemble the dense, warm reactions that routinely occur in a chemist’s test tubes. One aspect of chemistry in space that researchers are interested in is the formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are molecules of carbon and hydrogen that make a broad array of chemicals on earth and in the void of space. Researchers have seen signs of light interacting with a variety of these molecules in space and being absorbed—leaving a distinctive fingerprint in the remaining light that reaches Earth. These molecules are estimated to contain somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of the carbon spread across the interstellar medium, and the molecules’ foundational building blocks are benzene (C₆H₆)—a ring of six carbon atoms, each holding a hydrogen atom.

Since 1999, researchers have had a model that they thought explained how benzene formed from smaller molecules. However, the challenges of performing experiments at the low temperatures and densities involved in mimicking the conditions in the interstellar medium have meant that researchers have relied on their theoretical understanding of the process and haven’t thoroughly tested it in experiments.

Now, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski and members of her lab have used tools developed in physics laboratories to recreate the necessary conditions and have investigated how the chemistry plays out. The team described their experiment in an article published in the journal Nature Astronomy in May 2025. When they tested the process, the first steps played out as expected, but then they were surprised to find that the benzene failed to form at the final step. Their results give scientists a new window into how chemistry occurs in the interstellar medium and reopens the question of how carbon gets caught up in PAHs throughout space.

The key to recreating the chemistry occurring in the interstellar medium was creating a vacuum in a chamber and using lasers to cool molecules and hold them in place in the vacated space. This required the researchers to look at just a small number of molecules and to set aside the beakers and test tubes that are stereotypical of chemistry and instead rely on large metal chambers, air pumps, laser beams and many mirrors and lenses.

“It's a laboratory full of lasers, and vacuum chambers, and optics,” Lewandowski says. “It fills up half a room to be able to cool down these hundred little molecules.”

Selecting the right color of laser and aligning the beams correctly allows the researchers to suspend—trap—particles in a vacuum chamber as well as cool them down through a process called laser cooling. Laser cooling relies on the fact that light can give atoms and molecules a shove to slow them down and that the interaction can be tailored to depend on how the particles are moving. Carefully applied, laser cooling can get molecules down to temperatures just above absolute zero.

“Laser cooling and trapping has really been in the domain of physicists,” Lewandowski says. “The nice thing about JILA is we have physicists and chemists working together. In my own group, we have both backgrounds, and so we have the tools now that can answer these questions that really chemists didn't have the technology to tackle and physicists didn't know it was an interesting question to answer.”

These techniques allow them to focus on a small number of molecules and get a close look at the interactions that normally are obscured in a chaos of many reactions occurring rapidly and simultaneously.

With the equipment creating the needed conditions, the group started following the proposed recipe for creating benzene in the interstellar medium. The recipe’s main ingredient is a molecule of two carbon atoms and two hydrogen atoms, called acetylene (C₂H₂). The first step is mixing acetylene with molecules containing two nitrogen atoms and one hydrogen atom (N₂H⁺). The nitrogen atoms can provide their hydrogen atom to create new molecules with two carbon and three hydrogen atoms. That opens the door to two more steps of interactions with acetylene molecules to produce a molecule with six carbon atoms and five hydrogen atoms (C₆H₅⁺)—just one hydrogen short of the target benzene ring. The exact behavior of this molecule is not thoroughly understood, but the established recipe proposed that it could form benzene by capturing a molecule made from a pair of hydrogens and then letting the excess atoms go.

The team supplied just enough of the needed ingredients in the chamber so that it was improbable that more than two molecules would be reacting at a time. Using laser cooling, they cooled the molecules in the chamber down to just a few degrees Kelvin. This setup let them recreate what happens when two lonely molecules finally come together in space and get the chance to interact.

The group repeatedly ran the experiment, stopping after different amounts of time to eject the cloud of molecules and check which molecules had been formed. They saw the mixture progress through the expected steps of the recipe. They observed increases of various molecules as they were created and then decreases as they were consumed in the construction of even larger molecules. But as they waited progressively longer and longer, they never caught sight of any benzene rings. The mixture in the chamber eventually just reached a steady amount of C₆H₅⁺, and the final step of the recipe failed to occur.

“Initially we were very confused—and a little irritated—because we could never get the final reaction to happen,” says JILA postdoctoral researcher G. Stephen Kocheril, the lead author of the paper.

After performing several runs of the experiment and analyzing the data, the team concluded that the expected chain of events wasn’t happening and there must be something else occurring to produce all the benzene in space.

“None of the models now actually predict what's out there,” Lewandowski says. “If you look at observations of how many of these molecules we have out there, no model works. So we sort of said, ‘this model isn't it.’ We don't have a new model yet; that's what we're working on now. So it was kind of big for the community because it changed how larger and larger carbon-containing molecules are formed in space.”

Moving beyond the old explanation gives chemists insights into how they should think about the formation of these molecules and provides astronomers with new clues about which molecules they should be keeping an eye out for if they want to understand the chemistry happening out in the interstellar medium.

JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski and members of her lab have shattered a 25-year-old theory about how benzene forms in the interstellar medium, revealing that the long-accepted chemical recipe doesn’t work under space-like conditions. Their groundbreaking laser-cooling experiments open a new chapter in understanding the origins of complex carbon molecules in the cosmos.

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Building the quantum workforce of the future: A new study seeks the way

Steven Burrows — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 17:28:39 +0000

Building the quantum workforce of the future: A new study seeks the way Steven Burrows Wed, 10/08/2025 - 11:28

Daniel Strain / ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Strategic Communications

In recent years, quantum technology companies have begun to pop up across the United States. These companies design technologies that tap into some of the unique properties of very small things like atoms and electrons. Such technologies include “quantum computers” that could one day discover previously unknown medications, or sensors that can detect signs of illness in a single puff of breath. But the growth of the industry also raises a major question, said physicist Heather Lewandowski, one of the project leads: How can the nation better prepare students to enter this uncharted industry?

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JILA and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Alum Dr. Olivia Krohn is Awarded the 2025 APS Global Summit Thesis Prize

Steven Burrows — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:12:23 +0000

JILA and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Alum Dr. Olivia Krohn is Awarded the 2025 APS Global Summit Thesis Prize Steven Burrows Mon, 03/24/2025 - 10:12

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry / JILA Science Communicator

JILA and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Physics alum Dr. Olivia Krohn has been awarded the Thesis Prize at the 2025 APS Global Summit. Image credit: Olivia Krohn

Dr. Olivia Krohn, a former JILA graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories, has been awarded the prestigious Justin Jankunas dissertation award, given out by the American Physical Society (APS) division of chemical physics at the APS Global Summit conference. This award recognizes exceptional doctoral research that advances the frontiers of physics. Krohn’s award highlights her dissertation research, which bridges the legacy of JILA’s origins in astrophysics with its current role as a global leader in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics.

Krohn’s thesis, completed under the mentorship of JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski, investigates the ion-neutral gas-phase chemical reactions of interstellar relevance using cold arrays of trapped ions known as “coulomb crystals”. Her work explores the fundamental processes that govern the chemistry of space—particularly focusing on the elusive ion CCl⁺—within the controlled conditions of the laboratory.

“While ‘JILA’ once stood for the ‘Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics,’ the name is now an acronym-less moniker signifying a research center that pushes the frontier of AMO physics,” says Krohn. “My dissertation is a great example that these two identities of JILA are still sometimes entangled.”

To trap and cool the cold ensembles into Coulumb crystals, an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) environment is needed to make the crystal. However, having the ions in UHV is not the only influence in creating Coulomb crystals. By doing this, Krohn could simulate key reactions of the interstellar medium. Her research not only provided insight into chemical networks that may help explain why CCl⁺ has yet to be detected in space but also advanced the understanding of how chemical reactions behave at temperatures close to absolute zero—where quantum mechanics begins to dominate.

A major component of her work also involved developing methods to pair a traveling wave Stark decelerator with the ion trap, an innovation that allows precise tuning of the collision energy between ions and neutral molecules.

“At the colder end of this spectrum, at collision energies equivalent to a few Kelvin,” she explains, “we can venture into regimes where quantum mechanics plays a more direct role on the chemical dynamics and push the frontier of studying fundamental chemical transformation to colder and more controlled systems.”

Dr. Lewandowski praised Krohn’s scientific leadership and creativity throughout her graduate career.

“This is a well-deserved recognition of the outstanding work Olivia completed for her Ph.D. dissertation,” Lewandowski says. “She was a true leader in these studies, which have important implications for chemistry in the interstellar medium. I was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to work with her during her time at JILA.”

Reflecting on the award, Krohn expressed gratitude for the community that supported her research.

“I was extremely humbled and grateful to receive this award,” she notes. “I am thankful for the amazing guidance of Heather and for the incredible teammates I worked beside in my Ph.D. I am indebted to support from my friends and family. And of course, I learned so much from our amazing JILA shop, support staff, and colleagues. It was a privilege to conduct my dissertation research at JILA.”

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Creating a Global Map of Different Physics Laboratory Classes

Steven Burrows — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 19:59:50 +0000

Creating a Global Map of Different Physics Laboratory Classes Steven Burrows Fri, 12/13/2024 - 12:59

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry / JILA Science Communicator

World map of number of survey responses. Shown on a log scale, each colored country has at least one response; countries in gray have no responses. Credit: Steven Burrows / JILA

To better understand these differences, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski and a group of international collaborators are working towards creating a global taxonomy, a classification system that could create a more equitable way to compare these courses. Their findings were recently published in Physical Review Physics Education Research.

With a global taxonomy, instructors can have a more precise roadmap for navigating and improving their courses, leading to a brighter future for physics education worldwide.

“The ultimate taxonomy will help education researchers both understand physics lab education broadly and also be able to compare and contrast studies done around the world,” says Lewandowski.

An International Need for Global Mapping

According to Gayle Geschwind, the paper’s first author and a recently graduated JILA Ph.D. researcher, the project began as an international conversation between physicists who realized that comparing lab course assessments was not always straightforward.

“It can be hard for instructors to get useful information,” said Geschwind. “For example, a sophomore-level course can’t easily be compared to an introductory one, but right now, that’s often the only data available for comparison. Lab courses vary in how they're taught, the methods they use, and the equipment the students can interact with. And these lab courses are expensive; some use nice equipment, others aren’t able to.”

This mismatch prompted the researchers to develop a method that will eventually result in a database of the many different laboratory courses for physics across the globe.

Starting with Surveys

The team’s first task was to build a robust survey to capture how lab courses are structured worldwide. The researchers started with a brainstorming session that was then refined into a more extensive survey to address course content, the kinds of equipment available, and how students were assessed.

Once the survey was ready, the team interviewed instructors from 23 countries to ensure the questions were clear and applicable to different educational systems. From these early interviews, Geschwind, Lewandowski, and their collaborators improved their survey. While the earlier editions had options for instructors to put in the major and minor goals of the course, based on the feedback from the interviews, the team decided to add an option for a future goal, where an instructor could add other techniques students could learn in the future.

Along with the improvements to their survey, Lewandowski and Geschwind found a challenge early on in the phrasing of some of the survey questions.

Geschwind shared a telling anecdote: “Heather and I spent three or four hours on one question’s wording about how many students are in each lab section... It turns out ‘lab section’ doesn’t mean the same thing outside the U.S., and eventually, we had to phrase the question very creatively to get our point across.”

Beyond the language issues, the team discovered surprising differences in lab structures. In some countries, labs might meet daily for two weeks rather than weekly throughout the semester. Other differences were more extreme, like an interviewee based in Africa who shared that students sometimes had to “stick screwdrivers into electrical outlets” just to see if the power was on that day—a stark contrast to the well-equipped labs in wealthier nations.

Finding the General Themes

After finalizing the survey through an iterative process of interviews and revisions, the team sent it to their network of lab instructors, asking them to complete it and share it with others. While the researchers initially gathered responses primarily from Western Europe and the U.S., they soon expanded their efforts by compiling a list of every country and cold-mailing institutions worldwide. To their surprise, they received many responses, including from regions historically underrepresented in STEM, helping enrich the global database of physics lab courses.

From the survey responses, the researchers found some prominent initial themes. Across the board, lab courses emphasized technical skills and group work. Geschwind was fascinated by the fact that “an introductory mechanics lab course doesn’t differ much from place to place” despite the variety in equipment and resources.

Another interesting result was about the number of learning goals instructors have for their students in the courses. On average, instructors identified nearly 12 distinct goals per course, highlighting the complex nature of laboratory environments as part of courses designed to foster a broad range of knowledge and skill development.

Perhaps one of the survey's most unexpected outcomes was its immediate impact on the instructors who took it. Many began rethinking their own courses during the process.

“They’d see something in the survey and go, ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea! We don’t do that, but I’d love to implement it,’ ” Geschwind noted.

In fact, the survey even included links to resources and best practices that participants could explore, making it a research tool and a learning opportunity for the instructors.

Creating a More Thorough Map

Looking ahead, the research team has big plans for their data. The ultimate goal is to create a global database of lab courses, and standardized categorization of these courses, that can help instructors compare and improve their teaching methods. Geschwind explained that this database could be beneficial for instructors who want to redesign their courses, as it would allow them to see what others are doing in similar classes worldwide.

“We eventually want to get this database of information...so if an instructor wants to restructure their electronics course, they can see what others are doing,” she added.

The project is currently unfunded, with most of the team volunteering their time, but that hasn’t stopped them from envisioning future developments. Geschwind suggested that in the future, the team could use clustering algorithms to group similar courses and identify trends, such as whether certain types of lab courses, e.g., second-year electronics labs, unexpectedly share similarities with others, such as senior-level quantum labs.

As the project progresses, the team hopes to gather more data, particularly from underrepresented regions, to make the taxonomy even more comprehensive.

“Eventually, this could lead to better assessments and more informed teaching practices, making physics lab education stronger globally,” Geschwind said.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Physics lab courses are vital to science education, providing hands-on experience and technical skills that lectures can’t offer. Yet, it’s challenging for those in Physics Education Research (PER) to compare course to course, especially since these courses vary wildly worldwide.

To better understand these differences, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski and a group of international collaborators are working towards creating a global taxonomy, a classification system that could create a more equitable way to compare these courses. Their findings were recently published in Physical Review Physics Education Research.

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JILA Participates in the Inaugural NSF Quantum Showcase on Capitol Hill

Steven Burrows — Mon, 13 May 2024 17:21:00 +0000

JILA Participates in the Inaugural NSF Quantum Showcase on Capitol Hill Steven Burrows Mon, 05/13/2024 - 11:21

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry / JILA Science Communicator

(L to R): JILA Fellow and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Physics professor Heather Lewandowski and NSF Director Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan listen as JILA graduate student Qizhong Liang explains some of the quantum research happening at JILA.

To highlight the pivotal role of federal funding in advancing quantum research, the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted its inaugural Quantum Showcase on Capitol Hill two weeks ago. The event highlighted the potential of government-funded quantum initiatives and included NSF-funded quantum researchers nationwide. JILA, a joint institute between the University of Colorado Boulder and NIST, was represented at the event by JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski and JILA graduate student Qizhong Liang, a member of JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye’s research group.

With support from the CU system Office of Government Relations, Lewandowski and Liang also met with staff from Colorado’s congressional delegation during their day at the Capitol to discuss the university's quantum strengths and priorities.

The NSF’s showcase featured a variety of ongoing programs nationwide, emphasizing their potential influences on future technology and global competitiveness. The event heavily focused on bridging quantum research and theory with real-world applications, giving audiences of all backgrounds, including policymakers and their staff, something to look forward to.

During the event, lawmakers, including those leading the U.S. House’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee, directly engaged with participants like Lewandowski and Liang and emphasized the importance of quantum research, including passing the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act, legislation designed to advance quantum science and technology in the U.S. NSF Director Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan spoke directly to Liang and Lewandowski as they highlighted the ongoing NSF-sponsored innovations happening at JILA, including a novel research project focusing on laser combs.

“The laser breathalyzer we built for detecting COVID-19 is the first demonstration of how optical frequency combs, a Nobel-winning laser technology born in JILA, can be used in non-invasive medical diagnostics,” Liang elaborates. “We are thrilled to see how many other medical conditions, including asthma, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, can potentially be simultaneously detected simply by measuring the exhaled breath molecular contents in a non-invasive, low-cost, and real-time manner.”

Scott Sternberg, Executive Director of the CUbit Quantum Initiative, a partnership between ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, JILA/NIST, and industry, was also on Capitol Hill for a Quantum Stakeholders Day, and stopped by the showcase.

The timing of this inaugural showcase is notable, as Colorado has become one of the nation's key hubs for quantum research and industry in the last twenty years. Institutions like JILA, NIST, and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� are crucial to this Front Range hub. ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Physics department, of which many faculty are also JILA Fellows, consistently ranks highly among the top ten universities for its quantum physics program, attracting top talent for the next generation of the quantum workforce.

At JILA, the collaborative environment and cutting-edge facilities help drive advancements in quantum computing, sensing, communication, and more, contributing to the nation’s quantum ecosystem. JILA also hosts three NSF-funded science centers within the Institute, including the Physics Frontier Center; Quantum Systems through Entangled Science and Engineering (Q-SEnSE), an NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute; and STROBE, an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC). These NSF-supported centers are key in advancing novel quantum research happening within the institute.

The centers also play a crucial role in educating the next generation of quantum scientists and engineers. Programs like the Quantum Forge course at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� aim to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to tackle the challenges of quantum technology, fostering a diverse and highly skilled workforce.

At the government level, quantum educational initiatives are gaining momentum as policymakers recognize the importance of preparing a skilled workforce for the quantum era. Programs like the 2022 QIST (Quantum Information Science and Technology) Workforce Development Plan, the National Q-12 Education Partnership (which exposes K-12 schools to more quantum education tools), or the ExpandQISE, an NSF-funded program specifically focused on educating students from underrepresented backgrounds in quantum technology and engineering aim to accelerate the development of quantum technologies through targeted investments in education, training, and workforce development.

These initiatives prioritize collaboration between government agencies, academia, and industry to ensure students and professionals access cutting-edge quantum education and training programs. Events like the NSF showcase serve as critical platforms to highlight the real-world use cases of government-funded quantum research, where advocates like Lewandowski and Liang can emphasize the importance of this sustained investment by the U.S. government.

“It was a great opportunity to highlight the exciting science and education efforts happening at JILA and CU broadly,” Lewandowski explains, “We were able to engage with a large variety of congressional staffers about the importance of NSF-sponsored research and education efforts.”

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Cold Coulomb Crystals, Cosmic Clues: Unraveling the Mysteries of Space Chemistry

Steven Burrows — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 17:18:29 +0000

Cold Coulomb Crystals, Cosmic Clues: Unraveling the Mysteries of Space Chemistry Steven Burrows Tue, 04/16/2024 - 11:18

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry / JILA Science Communicator

Coulomb crystals are surrounded by molecules used in the Lewandowski laboratory to study astrochemical reactions. Image credit: Steven Burrows / JILA

Now, in the recently published cover article of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski and former JILA graduate student Olivia Krohn highlight their work to mimic ISM conditions by using Coulomb crystals, a cold pseudo-crystalline structure, to watch ions and neutral molecules interact with each other.

From their experiments, the researchers resolved chemical dynamics in ion-neutral reactions by using precise laser cooling and mass spectrometry to control quantum states, thereby allowing them to emulate ISM chemical reactions successfully. Their work brings scientists closer to answering some of the most profound questions about the chemical development of the cosmos.

Filtering Via Energy

“The field has long been thinking about which chemical reactions are going to be the most important to tell us about the makeup of the interstellar medium,” explains Krohn, the paper’s first author. “A really important group of those is the ion-neutral molecule reactions. That's exactly what this experimental apparatus in the Lewandowski group is suited for, to study not just ion-neutral chemical reactions but also at relatively cold temperatures.”

To begin the experiment, Krohn and other members of the Lewandowski group loaded an ion trap in an ultra-high vacuum chamber with various ions. Neutral molecules were introduced separately. While they knew the reactants going into the ISM-type chemical experiment, the researchers weren’t always certain what products would be created. Depending on their test, the researchers used different types of ions and neutral molecules similar to those in the ISM. This included CCl+ ions fragmented from tetrachloroethylene.

“CCl+ has been predicted to be in different regions of space. But nobody's been able to effectively test its reactivity with experiments on Earth because it's so difficult to make,” Krohn adds. “You have to break it down from tetrachloroethylene using UV lasers. This creates all kinds of ion fragments, not just CCl+, which can complicate things.”

Whether using calcium or CCl+ ions, the experimental setup allowed the researchers to filter out unwanted ions using resonant excitation, leaving the desired chemical reactants behind.
“You can shake the trap at a frequency resonant with a particular ion’s mass-to-charge ratio, and this ejects them from the trap,” says Krohn.

Cooling via Laser to Create Coulomb Crystals

After filtering, the researchers cooled their ions using a process known as Doppler cooling. This technique uses laser light to reduce the motion of atoms or ions, effectively cooling them by exploiting the Doppler effect to preferentially slow particles moving toward the cooling laser. As the Doppler cooling lowered the particles’ temperatures to millikelvin levels, the ions arranged themselves into a pseudo-crystalline structure, the Coulomb crystal, held in place by the electric fields within the vacuum chamber. The resulting Coulomb crystal was an ellipsoid shape with heavier molecules sitting in a shell outside the calcium ions, pushed out of the trap's center by the lighter particles due to the differences in their mass-to-charge ratios.

Thanks to the deep trap that contains the ions, the Coulomb crystals can remain trapped for hours, and Krohn and the team can image them in this trap. In analyzing the images, the researchers could identify and monitor the reaction in real time, seeing the ions organize themselves based on mass-to-charge ratios.

The team also determined the quantum-state dependence of the reaction of calcium ions with nitric oxide by fine-tuning the cooling lasers, which helped produce certain relative populations of quantum states of the trapped calcium ions.

“What's fun about that is it leverages one of these more specific atomic physics techniques to look at quantum resolved reactions, which is a little bit more, I think, of the physics essence of the three fields, chemistry, astronomy, and physics, even though all three are still involved,” adds Krohn.

Timing is Everything

Besides trap filtration and Doppler cooling, the researchers' third experimental technique helped them emulate the ISM reactions: their time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) setup. In this part of the experiment, a high-voltage pulse accelerated the ions down a flight tube, where they collided with a microchannel plate detector. The researchers could determine which particles were present in the trap based on the time it took for the ions to hit the plate and their imaging techniques.

“Because of this, we've been able to do a couple of different studies where we can resolve neighboring masses of our reactant and product ions,” adds Krohn.

This third arm of the ISM-chemistry experimental apparatus improved the resolution even further as the researchers now had multiple ways to determine which products were created in the ISM-type reactions and their respective masses.

Calculating the mass of the potential products was especially important as the team could then switch out their initial reactants with isotopologues with different masses and see what happened.

As Krohn elaborates, “That allows us to play cool tricks like substituting hydrogens with deuterium atoms or substituting different atoms with heavier isotopes. When we do that, we can see from the time-of-flight mass spectrometry how our products have changed, which gives us more confidence in our knowledge of how to assign what those products are.”

As astrochemists have observed more deuterium-containing molecules in the ISM than is expected from the observed atomic deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio, swapping isotopes in experiments like this allows researchers to get one step closer to determining why this may be.

“I think, in this case, it allows us to have good detection of what we're seeing,” Krohn says. “And that opens more doors.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

While it may not look like it, the interstellar space between stars is far from empty. Atoms, ions, molecules, and more reside in this ethereal environment known as the Interstellar Medium (ISM). The ISM has fascinated scientists for decades, as at least 200 unique molecules form in its cold, low-pressure environment. It’s a subject that ties together the fields of chemistry, physics, and astronomy, as scientists from each field work to determine what types of chemical reactions happen there.

Now, in the recently published cover article of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski and former JILA graduate student Olivia Krohn highlight their work to mimic ISM conditions by using Coulomb crystals, a cold pseudo-crystalline structure, to watch ions and neutral molecules interact with each other.

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JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski interviewed by Colorado 9News

Steven Burrows — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 22:20:37 +0000

JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Heather Lewandowski interviewed by Colorado 9News Steven Burrows Tue, 07/25/2023 - 16:20

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry / JILA Science Communicator

Colorado 9News recently interviewed JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski as she discussed a recent paper with over 1,000 authors. This recent paper, published in the Astrophysical Journal, focused on solving the mystery of the Sun's corona, a ring of significantly hotter temperatures surrounding the Sun compared to its core. Lewandowski recruited over 1,000 undergraduate students as researchers to study this phenomenon as they analyzed data from observations of the corona. The entire project took multiple years and culminated in over 56,000 hours of research. In the 9News interview, Lewandowski stated: "It's really important for us to understand our Sun because it has a large impact on Earth."

While Lewandowski's main research focuses on quantum physics, this research project began during the COVID-19 pandemic when a colleague reached out with a unique opportunity: involving the students in actual astrophysical research. Lewandowski, who also focuses on physics education research (PER), jumped at the chance. "We thought, wouldn't it be great if we could have them [the students] do actual research?" She explained in the 9News interview. From there, Lewandowski involved over 1,000 undergraduate students in the research process, resulting in a paper with over 1,000 authors. "They were really beginning to feel like scientists," Lewandowski added in the 9News interview. "They really appreciated the process of science. It was really exciting to see that excitement from the students over three semesters."

Colorado 9News recently interviewed JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski as she discussed a recent paper with over 1,000 authors. This recent paper, published in the Astrophysical Journal, focused on solving the mystery of the Sun's corona, a ring of significantly hotter temperatures surrounding the Sun compared to its core. Lewandowski recruited over 1,000 undergraduate students as researchers to study this phenomenon as they analyzed data from observations of the corona. The entire project took multiple years and culminated in over 56,000 hours of research. In the 9News interview, Lewandowski stated: "It's really important for us to understand our Sun because it has a large impact on Earth."

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JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski's research highlighted in "Popular Science" Magazine

Steven Burrows — Wed, 17 May 2023 17:20:43 +0000

JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski's research highlighted in "Popular Science" Magazine Steven Burrows Wed, 05/17/2023 - 11:20

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry / JILA Science Communicator

Coronal loops on the sun are captured in ultraviolet light using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

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, revealing the creativity and ingenuity of undergraduate students in scientific research.

“The question of why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than the ‘surface’ of the sun is one of the main outstanding questions in solar physics,” says Lewandowski in the article.

With their results published in the Astrophysical Journal, the study allowed undergraduates to participate in scientific research, gaining skills and experience that would help their future careers.

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, revealing the creativity and ingenuity of undergraduate students in scientific research.

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How 1,000 undergraduates helped solve an enduring mystery about the sun

Steven Burrows — Tue, 09 May 2023 17:58:35 +0000

How 1,000 undergraduates helped solve an enduring mystery about the sun Steven Burrows Tue, 05/09/2023 - 11:58

Daniel Strain / ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Strategic Communications

Radiation streaming from the sun's corona becomes visible during an eclipse.

The research represents a nearly-unprecedented feat of data analysis: From 2020 to 2022, the small army of mostly first- and second-year students examined the physics of more than 600 real solar flares—gigantic eruptions of energy from the sun’s roiling corona.

The researchers, partially lead by JILA fellow Heather Lewandowski, and including 995 undergraduate and graduate students, published their finding May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. The results suggest that solar flares may not be responsible for superheating the sun’s corona, as a popular theory in astrophysics suggests.

“We really wanted to emphasize to these students that they were doing actual scientific research,” said James Mason, lead author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Study co-author Heather Lewandowski agreed, noting that the study wouldn’t be possible without the undergrads who contributed an estimated 56,000 hours of work to the project.

“It was a massive effort from everyone involved,” said Lewandowski, professor of physics and fellow of JILA, a joint research institute between ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Read the full article here.

For a new study, a team of physicists recruited roughly 1,000 undergraduate students at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� to help answer one of the most enduring questions about the sun: How does the star’s outermost atmosphere, or “corona,” get so hot?

The research represents a nearly-unprecedented feat of data analysis: From 2020 to 2022, the small army of mostly first- and second-year students examined the physics of more than 600 real solar flares—gigantic eruptions of energy from the sun’s roiling corona.

The researchers, partially lead by JILA fellow Heather Lewandowski, and including 995 undergraduate and graduate students, published their finding May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. The results suggest that solar flares may not be responsible for superheating the sun’s corona, as a popular theory in astrophysics suggests.

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