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In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters, Rey and JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson, along with graduate student Sanaa Agarwal and researcher Asier Piñeiro Orioli from the University of Strasbourg, studied atom-light interactions in the case of effective four-level atoms, two ground (or metastable) and two excited levels arranged in specific one-dimensional and two-dimensional crystal lattices.

Researchers at JILA have developed a novel microscope that makes examining ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors possible on an unprecedented scale. The team’s work, recently published in Physical Review Applied, introduces a tabletop deep-ultraviolet (DUV) laser that can excite and probe nanoscale transport behaviors in materials such as diamond. This microscope uses high-energy DUV laser light to create a nanoscale interference pattern on a material’s surface, heating it in a controlled, periodic pattern. Observing how this pattern fades over time provides insights into the electronic, thermal, and mechanical properties at spatial resolutions as fine as 287 nanometers, well below the wavelength of visible light.

Reported recently in a new study published in Nature, a team of researchers, led by JILA and NIST Fellow and ��ñ���� Physics professor Jun Ye, in collaboration with Professor Eric Hudson’s team at UCLA’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, have found a way to make nuclear clocks a thousand times less radioactive and more cost-effective, thanks to a method creating thin films of thorium tetrafluoride (ThF4). 

Recent research at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry and the Institut d’Optique in Paris studied a collection of atoms in free space forming an elongated, pencil-shaped cloud and reported the potential observation of this desired phase transition. Yet, the results of this study puzzled other experimentalists since atoms in free space don’t easily synchronize.

To better understand these findings, JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and her theory team collaborated with an international team of experimentalists. The theorists found that atoms in free space can only partially synchronize their emission, suggesting that the free-space experiment did not observe the superradiant phase transition. These results are published in PRX Quantum.

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 ���� 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.

JILA Fellow and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Physicist and ��ñ���� Physics professor Adam Kaufman and his team have ventured into the minuscule realms of atoms and electrons. Their research involves creating an advanced optical atomic clock using a lattice of strontium atoms, enhanced by quantum entanglement—a phenomenon that binds the fate of particles together. This ambitious project could revolutionize timekeeping, potentially surpassing the "standard quantum limit" of precision.

In collaboration with JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye, the team highlighted their findings in Nature, demonstrating how their clock, operating under certain conditions, could exceed conventional accuracy benchmarks. Their work advances timekeeping and opens doors to new quantum technologies, such as precise environmental sensors.

JILA and NIST Fellows and ���� Physics professors Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson and their teams wanted to guide the community on which protocol is best to use under fundamental and realistic experimental conditions. Their results, published in Physical Review Research, revealed that when measurement efficiency is greater than 19%, the QND measurement protocol outperformed unitary dynamical evolution. This finding can have big implications for quantum metrology.

The interactions between quantum spins underlie some of the universe’s most interesting phenomena, such as superconductors and magnets. However, physicists have difficulty engineering controllable systems in the lab that replicate these interactions.

Now, in a recently published Nature paper, JILA and NIST Fellow and ��ñ���� Physics Professor Jun Ye and his team, along with collaborators in Mikhail Lukin’s group at Harvard University, used periodic microwave pulses in a process known as Floquet engineering, to tune interactions between ultracold potassium-rubidium molecules in a system appropriate for studying fundamental magnetic systems. Moreover, the researchers observed two-axis twisting dynamics within their system, which can generate entangled states for enhanced quantum sensing in the future.

An international team of researchers, led by JILA and NIST Fellow and ���� Physics Professor Jun Ye and his team, has made significant strides in developing a groundbreaking timekeeping device known as a nuclear clock

An international collaboration of physicists from India, Austria, and the USA—including JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey, along with NIST scientists Allison Carter and John Bollinger—proposed that tweaking the electric fields that trap ions can create stable, multilayered structures, opening up exciting new possibilities for future quantum technologies.