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Since it was first proposed in 2004 by David Weiss and Maxim Olshanii, it has been a goal to see whether atomic rearrangement and high-fidelity ground-state laser cooling could employed to prepare superfluids and low-entropy many-body states of itinerant matter. In this work, we demonstrate such a protocol, opening a new path to assembling ground-state many-body state of bosonic and fermionic quantum systems.

JILA is proud to recognize a major milestone for quantum science and technology as Infleqtion, the quantum technology company founded by JILA Fellow and CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï Professor Dana Anderson, has officially gone public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

JILA researchers, working with collaborators in Germany, demonstrated that new crystalline mirror coatings dramatically reduce atomic-level noise in optical cavities, enabling lasers with record‑breaking frequency stability. By outperforming traditional coatings by a factor of four, these mirrors open the door to more precise experiments and future advances in technologies such as atomic clocks and gravitational‑wave detection.

JILA is proud to announce that Professor Dana Z. Anderson, JILA Fellow and Professor of Physics and Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering at the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï, has been elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

JILA researchers have taken a major step toward realizing next‑generation nuclear clocks by studying how thorium‑doped crystals behave over time. In new experiments published in Nature, the team tracked the stability, temperature response, and reproducibility of three calcium‑fluoride crystals containing different concentrations of thorium. Over nearly a year of measurements, all three crystals demonstrated remarkably stable nuclear transition frequencies—an essential requirement for building reliable nuclear clocks.

Dr. Kai Li, a researcher in the Jun Ye Group, has been named the recipient of the 2026 European XFEL Young Scientist Award. This prestigious honor is awarded annually to an early-career scientist who has made exceptional contributions through experiments conducted at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL).

In a study published in Physical Review X Quantum, a team led by JILA and NIST Fellow and °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï physics professor Jun Ye has demonstrated—for the first time—narrow-line laser cooling of a molecule. By utilizing a previously unaddressed transition in the diatomic molecule yttrium monoxide (YO), the researchers have developed a new approach to manipulate internal states and molecular motion with unprecedented precision.

UNESCO named physicist Jun Ye to its Quantum 100 list—a catalogue of some of the top leaders around the world in the rapidly growing field of quantum science.

For the past several years, an experimental research group led by JILA Fellow James Thompson and a theoretical research group led by JILA Fellow Ana Maria Rey have been working together to study quantum interactions using cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED)—the science of how light contained in reflective cavities interacts with quantum particles, like individual atoms. Recently, they tackled many-body interactions with a new experiment, described in an article published in the journal Science. In the experiment, they successfully created interactions that require the participation of either three or four atoms to achieve the observed results.

JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye has once again been recognized as one of the world’s most influential scientists. For the 12th year in a row, Ye has earned a place on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list, an honor reserved for researchers whose work ranks among the top 1% of citations globally across their fields.