Research
JILA's faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral research associates explore some of today's most challenging and fundamental scientific questions.
Members of the Institute's AMO Physics Center use lasers and optical systems to study ultracold and ultrasmall worlds, where atoms, molecules, and devices obey the laws of quantum mechanics. The Institute's theoretical astrophysicists team up with observational astronomers to discern the structure and evolution of planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies as well as the origin and evolution of the universe itself. Year after year, professional collaborations among JILA researchers result in exceptional scientific progress, both in theory and experiment.
Here is a glossary of common scientific terms
.Research Highlights for Summer 2008
View archive of research highlights
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Splash 2
What makes the masers so interesting is that they have enabled the most accurate measurements possible of the mass of the black holes they orbit... Read More »
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Splash 2
For many years, chemists have explored the differences between liquids and solids. One difference is that liquid surfaces tend to be softer than solid surfaces... Read More »
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Bragging Rites
What happens to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) when its atoms interact strongly? One possibility for large attractive interactions is that the condensate shrinks and then explodes... Read More »
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The Missing Link
The Jin group recently came up with the first strong experimental link between superfluidity in ultracold Fermi gases and superconductivity in metals... Read More »
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From Mental to Experimental
The John Bohn lab at JILA owes its very existence to a 2002 decision by the Colorado Rockies to begin storing baseballs in a room with ~50% humidity....
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Stalking the X-Ray Frequency Comb
Fellow Jun Ye’s group is methodically working its way toward the creation of an X-Ray frequency comb... Read More »
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Nanoartisans Search for Quantum Tremors
Nanoartisans Cindy Regal, John Teufel, and Konrad Lehnert have come up with a clever new way to observe ordinary (very small) things behaving quantum mechanically...
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Where Have All the Hot Planets Gone?
Like people, planets can migrate far from where they were born. In the case of planets, they usually travel toward their parent star, but some may also move away... Read More »
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Creating A Monster
Graduate student Robyn Levine, Fellow Andrew Hamilton, and colleagues from the University of Chicago’s Kavli I nstitute for Cosmological Physics are working on modeling how supermassive black holes grow inside galaxies...
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