JILA

• 1. Introduction

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  JILA sits on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, a place where some of the strangest and most consequential discoveries in modern physics have been made. In 1995, a form of matter that had been theorized for decades but never actually seen was brought into existence within its walls. Two physicists, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, cooled a gas of atoms to temperatures so close to absolute zero that the atoms stopped behaving like individuals and merged into a single quantum entity. That achievement, creating the world's first Bose-Einstein condensate, would eventually earn a Nobel Prize. But it was only one of several firsts that have come out of this institute. What draws so many groundbreaking discoveries to a single campus building in Colorado? And what does a place like JILA actually study?

• 2. A Joint Foundation

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  JILA was founded in 1962, the product of a partnership between two institutions that might seem an unlikely pair. The University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, known as NIST, joined forces to create a research center that would combine academic inquiry with the precision-measurement expertise of the federal government. The name Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics reflected those early ambitions, though the institute eventually dropped the full name in favor of the simple initialism JILA. Faculty members at JILA hold appointments not just in physics but across a striking range of departments: Astrophysical and Planetary Science, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Molecular and Cellular and Developmental Biology, and Engineering. NIST members working in JILA's Quantum Physics Division hold joint faculty appointments at the university in those same departments, weaving the two institutions tightly together.

• 3. Firsts in Quantum Physics

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  The first Bose-Einstein condensate was achieved at JILA in 1995 by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, realizing a prediction that had stood for seventy years without experimental confirmation. A Bose-Einstein condensate forms when atoms are cooled so extremely that quantum effects dominate and many particles occupy the same quantum state simultaneously, behaving as one. Deborah S. Jin, also working at JILA, went further still. She produced the first demonstrations of a Fermionic condensate and explored what physicists call BEC-BCS crossover physics, extending the principles behind Bose-Einstein condensation into a different class of particles entirely. John L. Hall led the first demonstration of the frequency comb at JILA, a technique that allows scientists to measure the frequency of light with extraordinary accuracy. Each of these achievements answered questions that had been open for years or decades before JILA's researchers resolved them.

• 4. Nobel Prizes and Fellowships

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  Eric Cornell and John L. Hall are both Nobel laureates and remain on JILA's current faculty. Carl Wieman, who shared in the Bose-Einstein condensate discovery with Cornell, was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, though he is listed among previous affiliates rather than current faculty. David J. Wineland, previously affiliated with NIST, received a Nobel Prize in Physics as well. On the fellowship side, Margaret Murnane and Ana Maria Rey are both current faculty members who hold John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowships, the awards commonly known as genius grants. Deborah Jin, who was previously at JILA, was also a MacArthur Fellow before her death. Each year, JILA scientists publish more than two hundred original research papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings around the world.

• 5. Questions at the Edge of Knowledge

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  Research at JILA reaches across a wide band of questions. Scientists there probe the limits of quantum measurements and explore what quantum technologies might become possible. They design precision optical and X-ray lasers and investigate how light and matter interact at the most fundamental level. Quantum physics as it applies to chemistry and biology is another active thread. At the largest scale, JILA researchers study the processes that have governed how the universe evolved over nearly fourteen billion years. That sweep from the subatomic to the cosmological reflects the institute's unusual breadth. The frequency comb technique that John L. Hall demonstrated at JILA has become a foundational tool in precision measurement, with applications that range from optical clocks to the search for planets around distant stars.