Research Highlights
Spring 2007
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Warm Side of the Force
Quantum fluctuations of free space are responsible for a variety of curious phenomena: a gecko’s ability to walk across ceilings, the evaporation of black holes via Hawking radiation, and the fact that warmer surfaces can be stickier than cold ones... Read More »
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X-ray Vision
What’s hard is to make X-rays march in step in the same direction — in other words, act like a coherent beam of laser light. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first reasonable proposal to build an X-ray laser... Read More »
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Flash of Insight
There’s a new aspect to research on gamma-ray bursts: their use to discern features of the environment around the star that produced them during its core’s collapse into a black hole... Read More »
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Exploring a Cold New World
Researchers from the Ye, Bohn, and Greene groups are busy exploring a cold new world crawling with polar hydroxyl radical (OH) molecules. The JILA experimentalists have already discovered how to cool OH to “lukewarm” temperatures of 30 mK... Read More »
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The Second Wave
A second wave has appeared on the horizon of ultracold atom research. Known as the p-wave, it is opening the door to probing rich new physics, including unexplored quantum phase transitions... Read More »
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Deep Sea Diving
A Fermi sea forms at ultracold temperatures when fermions in a dilute gas stack up in the lowest possible energy states, with two fermions in each state, one spin up and one spin down... Read More »
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Necklaces of Fire
Two egg-shaped necklaces of magnificent stars orbit the enormous black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Sgr A* was thought to be past promoting new star formation; until the necklaces were discovered... Read More »
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The World's Coldest Transistor
JILA Fellow Dana Z. Anderson and JILA visiting scientist Alex Zozulya postulate that the ultracold coherent atoms in a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) could be configured to act like electrons in a transistor... Read More »