Science & Technology

Dialing in the temperature needed for precise nuclear timekeeping

Megan Maneval — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:28:16 +0000

Dialing in the temperature needed for precise nuclear timekeeping Megan Maneval Wed, 03/19/2025 - 08:28

JILA

For decades, atomic clocks have been the pinnacle of precision timekeeping, enabling GPS navigation, cutting-edge physics research and tests of fundamental theories. But researchers at JILA, in collaboration with the Technical University of Vienna, are pushing beyond atomic transitions to something potentially even more stable: a nuclear clock.

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2nd round of quantum seed grants awarded to drive innovation, impact

Megan Maneval — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:23:56 +0000

2nd round of quantum seed grants awarded to drive innovation, impact Megan Maneval Wed, 03/19/2025 - 08:23

Funded through nearly $1.5 million approved by the Colorado Economic Development Commission, these grants bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and commercialization.

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Ultrafast microscope makes movies one quadrillionth of a second at a time

Megan Maneval — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:42:46 +0000

Ultrafast microscope makes movies one quadrillionth of a second at a time Megan Maneval Thu, 03/13/2025 - 11:42

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

New �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder research harnesses the power of an ultrafast microscope to study molecular movement in space and time.

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Storytelling, not statistics, can make STEM more inclusive

Megan Maneval — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:59:45 +0000

Storytelling, not statistics, can make STEM more inclusive Megan Maneval Mon, 03/10/2025 - 11:59

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Eva Pietri studies how stories can help address gender bias and create inclusivity.

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Did ChatGPT write this? No, but how would you know?

Megan Maneval — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:31:03 +0000

Did ChatGPT write this? No, but how would you know? Megan Maneval Thu, 03/06/2025 - 07:31

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

In her Writing in the Age of AI course, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Teresa Nugent helps students think critically about new technology.

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Tiny insects could lead to big changes in robot design

Megan Maneval — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:37:33 +0000

Tiny insects could lead to big changes in robot design Megan Maneval Tue, 02/25/2025 - 14:37

College of Engineering and Applied Science

Sean Humbert is unlocking the biological secrets of the common housefly to make major advances in robotics and drones.

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New technology turns waste heat into electricity, defies physical limit

Greg B Swenson — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:56:10 +0000

New technology turns waste heat into electricity, defies physical limit Greg B Swenson Thu, 02/20/2025 - 13:56

Assistant Professor Longji Cui and his team have developed a new technology to turn thermal radiation into electricity in a way that literally teases the basic law of thermal physics.

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New sensor can take any gas and tell you what’s in it

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 17:22:06 +0000

New sensor can take any gas and tell you what’s in it Daniel William… Wed, 02/19/2025 - 10:22

Daniel Strain

Expert sommeliers can take a whiff of a glass of wine and tell you a lot about what’s in your pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon.

A team of physicists at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have achieved a similar feat of sensing, only for a much wider range of substances.

The group has developed a new laser-based device that can take any sample of gas and identify a huge variety of the molecules within it. It is sensitive enough to detect those molecules at minute concentrations all the way down to parts per trillion. Its design is also simple enough that researchers could employ the method quickly and at a low cost in a range of settings, from diagnosing illnesses in human patients to tracking greenhouse gas emissions from factories.

Qizhong Liang in Jun Ye's lab at JILA on the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

Jun Ye (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

The study was led by scientists at JILA, a joint research institute between �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and NIST. The team published its findings on Feb. 19 in the journal Nature.

“Even today I still find it unbelievable that the most capable sensing tool can in fact be built with such simplicity, using only mature technical ingredients but tied together with a clever computation algorithm,” said Qizhong Liang, lead author of the research and a doctoral student at JILA.

To show what the tool is capable of, Liang and his colleagues drilled down on an important question in medicine: What’s in the air you breathe out?

The researchers analyzed breath samples from real human subjects and showed that they could, for example, identify the types of bacteria living in peoples’ mouths. The technique could one day help doctors diagnose lung cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and much more.

Physicist Jun Ye, senior author of the study, said the new work builds on nearly three decades of research into quantum physics at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and NIST—especially around a type of specialized device known as a frequency comb laser.

“The Frequency comb laser was originally invented for optical atomic clocks, but very early on, we identified its powerful application for molecular sensing,” said Ye, a fellow of JILA and NIST and professor adjoint of physics at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “Still, it took us 20 years to mature this technique, finally allowing universal applicability for molecular sensing.”

A shaking cavity

To understand how the team’s technology works, it helps to understand that all gases, from pure carbon dioxide to your stinky breath after you eat garlic, carry a fingerprint of sorts.

If you probe those gases with a laser that spans multiple “optical frequencies,” or colors, the molecules in the gas samples will absorb that light at different frequencies. It’s almost like a burglar leaving behind a thumbprint at a crime scene. In a previous study, for example, Liang and his colleagues used this laser absorption detection principle to screen human breath samples for signs of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

Frequency combs are well suited to that technique because, unlike traditional lasers, they emit pulses of light in thousands to millions of colors at the same time. (JILA’s Jan Hall pioneered these lasers, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in 2005).

But to detect molecules at low concentrations, those lasers must also pass through the gas sample over distances of miles or more so that the molecules can absorb enough light.

To be practical, scientists must realize that distance within containers for gases that are measured on the scale of a foot.

“We enclose the gas sample with a pair of high-reflectivity mirrors, forming an ‘optical cavity,’” Liang said. “The comb light can now bounce between those mirrors several thousand times to effectively increase its absorption path length with the molecules.”

Or that’s the goal. In practice, optical cavities are tricky to work with and eject laser beams if they aren’t properly matched to the resonant modes of the cavity. As a result, scientists previously could only use a narrow range of comb light, and detect a narrow range of molecules, in a single test.

In previous research, Ye, Liang and their colleagues used specialized lasers to detect signs of COVID-19 infections in human breath. (Credit: NIST)

In the new study, Liang and his colleagues overcame this longstanding challenge. They presented a new technique they named Modulated Ringdown Comb Interferometry, or MRCI (pronounced “mercy”). Rather than keep its optical cavity steady, the team periodically changed its size. This jiggling, in turn, allowed the cavity to accept a much wider spectrum of light. The team then deciphered the complicated laser intensity patterns emerging from the cavity with computational algorithms to determine the samples’ chemical contents.

“We can now use mirrors with even larger reflectivity and send in comb light with even broader spectral coverage,” Liang said. “But this is just the beginning. Even better sensing performance can be established using MRCI.”

A sensor for breath

The team is now turning its new gas sniffer on human breath.

“Exhaled breath is one of the most challenging gas samples to be measured, but characterizing its molecular compositions is highly important for its powerful potential for medical diagnostics,” said Apoorva Bisht, co-author of the research and a doctoral student in Ye’s lab.

Bisht, Liang and Ye are now collaborating with researchers at �鶹��Ѱ��Anschutz Medical Campus and Children’s Hospital Colorado to use MRCI to analyze a range of breath samples. They are examining whether MRCI can distinguish samples taken from children with pneumonia from those taken from children with asthma. The group is also analyzing the breath of lung cancer patients before and after tumor removal surgery and is exploring whether the technology can diagnose people in early stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

“It will be tremendously important to validate our approach on real world human subjects,” Ye said. “Through close collaboration with our medical colleagues at �鶹��Ѱ��Anschutz, we are committed to developing the full potential of this technique for medical diagnosis.”

A new laser-based device can scan almost any sample of gas and detect its molecular ingredients down to concentrations in the parts per trillion—not unlike an expert sommelier taking a sniff of a glass of wine.

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Expanded opportunities for innovation and partnerships at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder

Megan Maneval — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:23:44 +0000

Expanded opportunities for innovation and partnerships at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Megan Maneval Mon, 02/17/2025 - 07:23

The Research & Innovation Office announced a targeted realignment in November to enhance strategic integration across key areas and best position itself to serve the university's growing research and innovation needs.

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CUriosity: What is the smallest thing in the universe?

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 22:08:11 +0000

CUriosity: What is the smallest thing in the universe? Daniel William… Wed, 02/05/2025 - 15:08

Daniel Strain

In CUriosity, experts across the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

Previously, astrophysicist Jeremy Darling tackled: “What is the biggest thing in the universe?” This week, Ethan Neil, associate professor in the Department of Physics, answers: “What is the smallest thing in the universe?”

Part of the tunnel that makes up the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Scientists use colliders like this one to smash together particles at incredible speeds, becoming what physicist Ethan Neil calls "the world's best microscopes." (Credit: CERN)

As with everything in physics, the answer may melt your brain—just a little. It also hinges on how you define “small,” said Ethan Neil, a theoretical physicist who studies incredibly small things.

Does smallest mean, for example, the object with the least mass? Or is it more about size, how much space an object takes up?

Previously in CUriosity

What is the biggest thing in the universe?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

As Neil put it: “The question is more complicated than it seems on the surface, partly just due to the weirdness of quantum physics. The world is unintuitive when we get to very short distance scales.”

Let’s start with mass. Neil explained that the universe, at least as we know it, is made up of elementary particles like electrons and quarks, small things that can’t be broken down into even smaller stuff. Think of them as the basic ingredients for making everything in the cosmos.

Physicists capture the family tree of these particles in a theory that dates back to the 1960s known as the Standard Model. Within that tree, the electron is superbly petite. Writing out its mass in kilograms, you’d get 0.000000000000000000000000000000911 (that’s 30 zeros). Another elementary particle, the electron neutrino, has an even smaller mass—although no one knows exactly how small. The sun ejects neutrinos constantly and, at this moment, trillions are moving through your body.

The question of size, however, is where things really get weird.

“In the Standard Model, things like the electron don’t have any size,” Neil said.

In other words, you could zoom in and in on them and never see anything. But how sure are scientists that electrons are truly infinitely small?

Using facilities like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, scientists have probed the universe down to really small scales. So far, they’ve been able to observe the universe down to about 20 zeptometers.

Or, as Neil put it: “If a single atom was the size of a human being, 20 zeptometers would be the size of an atom.”

If an electron has size, it has to be smaller than that. But theoretical physicists like Neil have also thought about what could exist at even smaller scales. That includes at the Planck length, a distance that, in meters, would take a decimal point followed by 34 zeros to write out.

At that scale, Neil explained, the inherent randomness and uncertainty of the universe dominates so much that concepts like size and distance become more or less meaningless. In fact, physicist John Baez predicted that if you tried to measure something that small, you’d concentrate enough energy to form a black hole.

That doesn’t, however, mean that there’s nothing there. One popular theory suggests that the elementary particles themselves are made up of vibrating strings that are about the size of the Planck length—meaning that everything you know could be the product of a concerto played by an orchestra of impossibly tiny violins.

One popular theory suggests that elementary particles like electrons, which make up everything in the universe, could be infinitely small—you could zoom in and in on them and never see anything.

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