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To honor students' abilities for clear and effective communication in quantum physics, Optica offers a yearly "best paper" award at its International Conference on Advanced Solid State Lasers. This year, JILA graduate student Daniel Carlson was among the list of winners, with his presentation "Carbon K-Edge Soft X-Rays Driven by a 3 µm,1 kHz OPCPA Laser System" winning over the judges.

On October 20th, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet visited JILA, a joint institute between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the �Ǹ�Թ�. During his visit, Bennet engaged with several of the institute's scientists and students, discussing their groundbreaking research and its implications. JILA Fellows Konrad Lehnert, Cindy Regal, Jun Ye, and Ana Maria Rey all spoke about their research during Bennett’s walking tour of JILA. Bennet visited Ye’s laboratory, discussing with several of his students the importance of atomic clocks and their impacts on technology such as GPS.

Bennet's engagement with JILA reinforces the significance of Colorado as a hub for scientific innovation and quantum research, and it sheds light on the potential collaborations that could emerge between political leadership and the scientific community.

Every year, the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) holds a university meeting where students from several of Colorado's prominent universities present their work as a poster to an industry audience, followed by networking with potential employers. For students, it's an excellent opportunity to practice public speaking, share their current research projects, and find potential industry jobs. Each year, three students are awarded a cash prize for how well they communicate their research and the design of their poster.

This year, JILA graduate students Qizhong Liang, from JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye's research group, and Drew Morrill, from JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane's and Henry Kapteyn's research group, have been awarded prizes for their poster presentations.

JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman have both been recently featured in an article for IEEE Spectrum. In a pair of Nature papers, Rey and Kaufman both demonstrated the phenomena of spin-squeezing to reduce noise in their quantum systems. "All objects that follow the rules of quantum physics can exist in multiple energy states at once, an effect known as superposition," explains the IEEE Spectrum article. "Spin squeezing reduces all those possible superposition states to just a few possibilities in some respects, while expanding them in others."

Leading the way in quantum sensing advancements, JILA, a renowned institute at the forefront of quantum sensing research, has once again proven its prowess. In a new Physics Magazine article, JILA graduate student Jarrod Reilly was highlighted in his work developing a groundbreaking approach that promises to redefine the capabilities of quantum sensors.

While academia has traditionally been the primary path for physicists, the industrial sector offers unique opportunities and advantages. This was certainly the case for Dr. Bin Wang, who was recently a JILA postdoctoral researcher, now a Senior Software Engineer at ASML.

Opening new possibilities for quantum sensors, atomic clocks and tests of fundamental physics, JILA researchers have developed new ways of “entangling” or interlinking the properties of large numbers of particles. In the process they have devised ways to measure large groups of atoms more accurately even in disruptive, noisy environments.

The new techniques are described in a pair of papers published in Nature. JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the �Ǹ�Թ�.

JILA Fellow and �Ǹ�Թ� professor Shuo Sun recently became the science advisor for �Ǹ�Թ�-based quantum technology company Icarus Quantum. Since its inception in 2020, Icarus Quantum has focused on developing on-demand single- and entangled-photon generators for the future quantum internet network. As Sun's research focuses on quantum information science using photons (light particles) as a means to transmit information, he will no doubt be a valuable asset to this Colorado start-up.

The JILA Physics Frontiers Center (PFC), an NSF-funded science center within JILA (a world-leading physics research institute), has recently been awarded a $25 million grant after a re-competition process.

This science center brings together 20 researchers across JILA to collaborate to realize precise measurements and cutting-edge manipulations to harness increasingly complex quantum systems. Since its establishment in 2006, the JILA PFC’s dedication to advancing quantum research and educating the next generation of scientists has helped it to stand out as the heart of JILA’s excellence.

Our paper reporting squeezing below the standard quantum limit in a programmable atom array has been published in nature! Congratulations to the team! Exciting to co-publish with the Browaeys/Yao and Roos/Rey teams too!