Spring/Summer 2005

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  Terms of Entanglement

  Markus Greiner, Cindy Regal, Jayson Stewart, and Debbie Jin have found the first-ever visual evidence of correlated ultracold atoms in the noise patterns present in images of an ultracold cloud of potassium. [Continue Reading]

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  X-Ray Flashes Deciphered

  Rosalba Perna and colleagues Jonathan Granot of Stanford and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study recently figured out the relationship between X-ray flashes, X-ray rich gamma-ray bursts, and gamma-ray bursts detected by different space-based observatories. [Continue Reading]

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  Sight-Seeing along a DNA Strand

  Lora Nugent-Glandorf and Tom Perkins have come up with an optical trap motion detector that can "see" protein motors moving one base at a time along a DNA helix. For some time scientists have been able to make optical traps that can track the movement of attached beads, but the method had a resolution of 1-2 nanometers, which was not sensitive enough to resolve .338 nm DNA base steps. [Continue Reading]

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  Light Control

  Pete Roos, Tara Fortier, Xiaoqin Li, Ryan Smith, Jessica Pipis, and Steve Cundiff are using a phase-controlled mode-locked laser to control quantum processes in semiconductors. Semiconductors are capable of producing electrical currents from light (and vice-versa) and are the basis for a wide variety of optoelectronic devices, including photodiodes, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells. [Continue Reading]

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  Space: Like a River

  Andrew Hamilton and Jason Lisle, who received his Ph.D. in astrophysical and planetary sciences in 2004, have proposed a new model for the flow of matter into stationary and rotating black holes. In their "river model of black holes," space flows like a river through a flat background, while objects (like light rays) that move through the river abide by the rules of special relativity. [Continue Reading]

• Black Holes: The Inside Story

  What really happens inside black holes? Andrew Hamilton and Scott Pollack, a graduate student in the Physics Department, recently decided to investigate the answer to this question. [Continue Reading]

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  There's Strontium in the Clock

  A high-powered JILA collaboration led by JILA Fellows Jun Ye and Chris Greene is making important progress toward developing an ultrastable, high-accuracy optical atomic clock. The new optical clock design will use a variety of laser sources including a femtosecond comb and a diode laser stabilized with an optical cavity, which, in turn, is locked to a narrow energy level transition in ultracold strontium atoms. [Continue Reading]

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  The Power of Mirrors

  Three years ago Jun Ye decided to apply an old idea for amplifying and stabilizing continuous-wave (cw) lasers to state-of-the-art ultrafast lasers. In 2002, Jason Jones, a postdoctoral fellow with Jun, analyzed whether the build-up cavities used to amplify cw laser outputs could be modified to work with ultrafast, mode-locked lasers. [Continue Reading]

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  The World's First UV Frequency Comb

  Jason Jones, Kevin Moll, Mike Thorpe, and Jun Ye have generated the world's first precise frequency comb in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) using a combination of an ultrafast mode-locked laser and a precision high-finesse optical cavity. The EUV frequency comb consists of regularly spaced sharp lines that extend into the EUV region of the electromagnetic spectrum. [Continue Reading]