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

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  Water Music on the Radio

  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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  Exotic Probes

  Xibin Zhou and his colleagues in the Kapteyn/Murnane group have come up with a clever new way to study the structure of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other molecules...   Read More »

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  Clock Talk

  By late 2006, Fellow Jun Ye’s clock team had raised the accuracy of its strontium (Sr)-lattice atomic clock to be just shy of that of the nation’s primary time and frequency standard, the NIST-F1 cesium (Cs) fountain clock...   Read More »

  
  
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  The Gravity of the Situation

  What sort of experiment could detect the effects of quantum gravity, if it exists? Theories that go beyond the Standard Model of physics include a concept that links quantum interactions with gravity....  
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  Every Breath You Take

  With every breath you take, you breathe out carbon dioxide and roughly 1000 other, different molecules. Some of these can signal the early onset of such diseases as asthma, cystic fibrosis, or cancer....   Read More »