Research Highlights
Winter 2008
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DNA: Force of Nature
The Perkins group is helping to develop DNA as a force standard for the nano world. Polymers of DNA act like springs, and DNA’s elasticity may one day provide a force standard.... Read More »
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Something Massive This Way Comes
In Ray Bradbury’s book Something Wicked This Way Comes, people get older or younger depending on which direction they ride on a carnival carousel. Something similar may happen to black holes... Read More »
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A Microscope without a Lens
The Kapteyn/Murnane group recently proved that you don’t need an accelerator facility to make the X-Rays for an X-Ray microscope. In fact, you can build the whole device on an optical bench... Read More »
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A Protein Runs Through It
An excellent way to watch proteins fold is to probe the inside of a microfluidics device with light. This tiny device contains micron-sized three-dimensional (3D) transparent channels that carry small amounts of liquid. Inside the channels, the fluid flow is laminar... Read More »
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Born to Spin, The question is: How fast?
Neutron stars are born in supernovae, spinning very fast. How fast they spin at birth depends on a variety of factors including the initial rotation of the star that goes supernova... Read More »
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Bohr + Schrödinger = Students Win
A solid understanding of the structure and behavior of atoms is important for understanding the physical world, from the basic building blocks of nature to the inner workings of modern technology. However, education researchers have expressed different opinions regarding the best way... Read More »
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One Ring to Rule Them All
Benzene has a special ring structure that allows some of its electrons to be shared among all six carbon atoms in the ring. It turns out that chemists like Fellow J. Mathias Weber can adjust the charge density... Read More »
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Twinkle, Twinkle Mighty Quasar
What did Fellow Jeff Linsky come home with from a 2006 SINS conference? He arrived at JILA with the realization that quasars twinkle for much the same reason stars twinkle: Light from both quasars and stars pass through turbulence that mixes up the light rays... Read More »
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Shocking Prediction Confirmed
Fellow Andrew Hamilton recently confirmed a prediction he made 10 years ago of the location of a reverse shock wave slowing the expansion of the debris from a supernova that occurred in 1006 AD... Read More »
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Lights, Magnets, Action!
When the Jin and Ye group collaboration wanted to investigate the creation of stable ultracold polar molecules, the researchers initially decided to make ultracold KRb (potassium-rubidium) molecules and then study their collision behavior... Read More »