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 & Fall 2009
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Extreme "Sheep" Herding
These strange diatomic rubidium (Rb) molecules are the world’s first long-range Rydberg molecules. They were recently formed in Tilman Pfau’s laboratory at the University of Stuttgart from an ultracold cloud of Rb atoms... Read More »
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Extreme "Sheep" Herding
The new molecules are as big as a virus. They’re ultracold. And, they’re held together by a ghostly quantum mechanical force field with the energy of about 100 billionths of an electron volt... Read More »
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Holy Monodromy!
Monodromy literally means "once around." The term is applied in mathematics to systems that run around a singularity. In these systems, a parameter that describes the state of the system changes... Read More »
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Cloud Tripping Through the Milky Ways
Our solar system is currently sprinting around the center of the Milky Way at a speed of 26 km/sec. But, we’re not just hurtling through empty space,... Read More »
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Rave Reviews for the Efimov Quartet
The most peculiar and fragile "molecules" ever discovered are the weakly bound triatomic Efimov molecules that form under specific conditions in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). JILA theorists have now shown that such molecules can interact with an additional atom... Read More »
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Attack of the Blobs
Supermassive black holes inside blazar galaxies emit powerful jets of particles traveling in opposite directions near the speed of light. Some are aimed toward the Earth. These jets emit radio waves, which makes them visible to radio telescopes as they streak across the sky... Read More »
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Crafting Star Systems like Our Own
Most known extrasolar planetary systems comprise planets whose orbits vary wildly from the nearly circular ellipses found in our solar systemThis wide variation in eccentricity is thought to occur when ... Read More »
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Buried Treasure
The Anderson and Cornell groups have adapted two statistical techniques used in astronomical data processing to the analysis of images of ultracold atom gases. Image analysis is necessary for obtaining quantitative information... Read More »