JILA Story Makes Physics 'Top Ten' List

The creation of the first high-density gas of ultracold molecules by scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been selected as one of the “top ten” physics news stories of the year by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) along with a related experiment at the University of Innsbruck.

“Ultracold polar molecules really represent now one of the hottest frontiers in physics,” NIST/JILA Fellow Jun Ye, an author of the paper, observed at the time. “They are potentially a new form of matter, a quantum gas with strong interactions that vary by direction and that you can control using external tools such as electric fields.”

Read the AIP release at: www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/879-1.html and the original NIST news release, “JILA scientists create first dense gas of ultracold ’polar’ molecules.”