JILA News

Deborah Jin passed away September 15, 2016, after a courageous battle with cancer. She was 47. Jin was an internationally renowned physicist and Fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Fellow of JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado.

Graduate student Maya Fabrikant has won one of three prizes awarded to the best posters presented by young researchers during the MOLEC 2016 conference held in Toledo, Spain September 11–16. Both graduate students and postdoctoral researchers were eligible for the prizes, which included a $200 Visa gift card. The three prizes were presented by the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

Fellows Cindy Regal and Konrad Lehnert have won the 2016 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research in Foundational Science and Technology, CO-LABS announced today. JILA Chair Dana Anderson submitted the nomination of their joint research on building, studying, and using devices that exploit the strange and powerful properties of quantum mechanics. The nomination was entitled, The JILA Quantum Machine Team: Extending Mastery of Quantum Mechanics from Microscopic Particles to Human-Made Machines.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has awarded David Nesbitt the 2017 E. Bright Wilson Award in Spectroscopy. The award, sponsored by the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry, recognizes outstanding accomplishments in fundamental or applied spectroscopy in chemistry. It consists of $5,000 and a certificate.

Katharine Gebbie, Senior Advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), died on August 17, 2016, after a short illness. She was 84. A legendary laboratory director at NIST, Gebbie was honored in 2015 when the most advanced laboratory building at NIST’s Boulder campus was renamed in her honor

Eric Coughlin has won the 2016 R. N. Thomas Award. The $1000 award comes from a fund established by Dr. Nora Andreasian, the widow of JILA co-founder Dick Thomas. Coughlin will also receive a book about Thomas’ storied career in astrophysics.

NRC Postdoc Ed Marti received an Outstanding Presentation Award for his presentation of the poster "Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermions in an Optical Clock" at the 2016  Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium held on July 20. This recognition was shared with NRC Postdoc Shimon Kolkowitz, who originally submitted the abstract as well as prepared the poster and a two-minute–two-slide synopsis of the work. Marti did a great job with both the oral and poster presentations even though he had just one day's notice after family matters kept Dr Kolkowitz from participating in the conference.

Jennifer Ellis won an Optical Society of America (OSA) award in recognition of her excellent oral contribution at the International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena, held July 17–22 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellis, who is a graduate student with the Kapteyn/Murnane group, spoke about her work on Femtosecond Dynamics of Solvated Electrons in Nanodroplets Probed with Extreme Ultraviolet Beams. She told how her group used EUV light to conduct time-resolved photoemission measurements of isolated nanodroplets in vacuum. With this technique, her group was able to observe what happens when nanodroplets absorb EUV photons. Ellis and her colleagues were able to watch the creation and relaxation of electrons surrounded by solvent molecules––inside the nanodroplets! Congratulations Jennifer!

Adam Kaufman has been awarded the 2016 DAMOP Thesis Prize for his outstanding thesis research on assembling neutral atoms in optical tweezers, work conducted in the Regal group at JILA. As part of this  work, Kaufman and his coworkers developed an experiment that allowed the team to use laser cooling to assemble arrays of ground-state neutral atoms in optical tweezers. 

Julia R.K. Cline was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!  Congratulations, Julia!

Former JILAn Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan is one of two 2016 Outstanding Graduates for Service in the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. Gopalakrishnan graduated from CU on May 7, 2016, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in engineering physics. As part of her 5-year program of study, she spent two years working with the magnetics group in the Kapteyn/Murnane labs.

President Barack Obama announced on May 20, 2016, his intent to appoint Dr. W. Carl Lineberger to a second term on the National Science Board. The National Science Board serves as an advisory board to the President and Congress on issues involving science and engineering. Lineberger’s duties will include helping to establish the policies of the National Science Foundation. He is currently completing a five-year term on the National Science Board that began in August 2011.

Congratulations to Matthew Winchester who was awarded a 2016 Goldwater Scholarship! Matthew is majoring in Engineering Physics, and is working on an honors research project on super-radiant lasers in James Thompson’s lab. After graduating with his undergraduate degree, Matthew plans to pursue a Ph.D. in physics, conducting research in atomic, molecular, and optical physics with an emphasis on precision metrology and then teach at the University level.

Tom Perkins discusses his atomic force spectroscopy research in this SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics) video.

Graduate Student Matt Norcia (Thompson group) received a JILA Scientific Achievement Award on February 18. The announcement took place during a special snack time in the Sunrise Room of the JILA Tower.

When James Bond needs a new gizmo to carry out acts of spymaster derring-do, he heads straight for Q. CU scientists have a gadget team of their own.To the physicists and chemists of CU-Boulder, Hans Green (Hist’95) and the JILA team say this: If you conceive it, we will build it.

President Obama has selected JILA Fellow Jun Ye of NIST's Quantum Physics Division to receive a 2015 Presidential Rank Award. The award cited Ye's work advancing "the frontier of light-matter interaction and focusing on precision measurement, quantum physics and ultracold matter, optical frequency metrology, and ultrafast science."

Dr. Katharine Blodgett Gebbie, long-time JILAn and former director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST's)  Physical Measurement Laboratory was honored by NIST on December 10. The most advanced laboratory building at the NIST campus in Boulder, Colo., was renamed after legendary laboratory director Gebbie.

Graduate student Chris Mancuso and senior research associate Dan Hickstein of the Kapteyn/Murnane group recently spoke with Amanda Grennell, a 5^th year PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. The researchers discussed the K/M group’s paper “Strong-field ionization with two-color circularly polarized laser fields,” which appeared in Physical Review A in March, 2015. The result is a delightful blog post of the K/M group’s groundbreaking research on imaging with circularly polarized laser fields. The story includes terrific animations prepared by Hickstein. The story was posted by the BioFrontiers Science Alliance.

JILA's Laser Guru Jan Hall spoke about Light, Atomic Clocks, and Testing Einstein’s Assumptions on Nov. 4, 2015, at the Keck Institute for Space Studies. A lively video of the talk can be found at http://kiss.caltech.edu/new_website/lectures/Hall_Lecture_2015.html