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Quantum science has the potential to further revolution technology in several fields, from computing to communication. As a world-renowned leader in the field, JILA Fellow Jun Ye will advise U.S. leaders on ways to bring these advances out of the lab and into real-world applications.

A new national quantum research center draws on JILA Fellows' and their expertise to make the United States an international leader in quantum technology.

JILA Fellow Jun Ye will head new science and engineering institute to bring quantum discoveries out of the lab and into real-world applications.

In the midst of a global pandemic, researchers and engineers find partnerships in unexpected places.

Cooling and trapping atoms has helped scientists advance their understanding of atomic and quantum physics over several decades. Now it’s time to move on to more complex systems, like molecules. But molecules have proven tricky to cool and trap efficiently. A new study from the Ye Lab has found a way to cool yttrium monoxide robustly and efficiently, which will allow them to study how they interact with each other in the quantum regime.

By using optical tweezers, the Kaufman and Ye groups are exploring a new kind of optical atomic clock—one that can run measurements for more than half a minute, an unprecedented coherence time. Not only does this finding open new possibilities for precision measurement, it’s a starting point to engineer interactions between many coherent and carefully-controlled atoms.

Understanding how three atoms interact when they are close together is really tricky. For the past decade scientists agreed that there was a universal “sweet spot”, a range called the van der Waals universality. In that range, three atoms were close enough that their interactions could be explained with simpler two-body formulas. But the Cornell Group at JILA is testing the limits of van der Waals universality, which could help form a better predictive model for other atom species.

Using a new silicon cavity, JILA’s Ye Group has built a laser with improved coherence to reduce the noise in two optical atomic clocks and achieve record high stability. Improving atomic clocks’ stability is crucial to evaluating the clock accuracy and using these tools for scientific experiments in physics and other disciplines.

When the Ye group measured the total quantum state of buckyballs, we learned that this large molecule can play by full quantum rules. Specifically, this measurement resolved the rotational states of the buckyball, making it the largest and most complex molecule to be understood at this level.

JILA researchers have created the first quantum degenerate gas of polar molecules. This new form of matter has been a decade-long goal of molecular chemistry. This achievement will allow researchers to better understand the role of quantum physics in chemical reactions, and could make molecules a potential candidate for quantum information storage or precision measurement tools.