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In a significant advance toward the future redefinition of the international unit of time, the second, a research team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has compared three of the world’s leading atomic clocks with record accuracy over both air and optical fiber links.

For nearly a century, scientists have worked to unravel the mystery of dark matter—an elusive substance that spreads through the universe and likely makes up much of its mass, but has so far proven impossible to detect in experiments. Now, a team of researchers have used an innovative technique called “quantum squeezing” to dramatically speed up the search for one candidate for dark matter in the lab.

JILA fellow Jun Ye has been named Highly Cited Researcher for 2020 by Clarivate Analytics. Ye has been awarded the Highly Cited Researcher in the field of physics every year since 2014.

A new national quantum research center draws on JILA Fellows' and their expertise to make the United States an international leader in quantum technology.

Famous thought experiment Schrödinger’s Cat posits that a quantum system can be in two opposing states simultaneously—a specific type of superposition. Creating cat states in a large number of atoms has been difficult for physicists. The Rey Theory Group has developed a new means of preparing these cat states in the state-of-the-art strontium optical atomic clock. Cat states could in turn improve the sensitivity of the clock beyond what is possible with independent atoms.

In the midst of a global pandemic, researchers and engineers find partnerships in unexpected places.

By using optical tweezers, the Kaufman and Ye groups are exploring a new kind of optical atomic clock—one that can run measurements for more than half a minute, an unprecedented coherence time. Not only does this finding open new possibilities for precision measurement, it’s a starting point to engineer interactions between many coherent and carefully-controlled atoms.

Mechanical oscillators are crucial to developing quantum computers and quantum networks, but they have to fight against noise. Measuring the quantum movement of the oscillator not only reduces its noise, it perfectly displays the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

We are organizing an upcoming workshop on optomechanical architectures for new physics searches through force signatures on scalable arrays of mechanical resonators.  The workshop is sponsored by an APS Moore Foundation Fundamental Physics convening award and co-sponsored by the JILA NSF Physics Frontier Center and JQI. 

Using a new silicon cavity, JILA’s Ye Group has built a laser with improved coherence to reduce the noise in two optical atomic clocks and achieve record high stability. Improving atomic clocks’ stability is crucial to evaluating the clock accuracy and using these tools for scientific experiments in physics and other disciplines.