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CU Boulder’s second annual Sandia Day drew over 160 registered attendees for a packed agenda highlighting the strong partnership between the university and Sandia National Laboratories, potential future avenues for collaborative, globally impactful research, and job and internship opportunities.

A $1M award from the Keck Foundation will fund the project, led by Scott Diddams. “Earning such a prestigious award for this project further reinforces CU Boulder’s reputation as a national and global leader in quantum science and technology,” said Massimo Ruzzene, vice chancellor for research and innovation.

The new grant will fund the JILA Physics Frontiers Center for six more years and seeks to spur collaborations among a wide range of scientists—potentially paving the way for new discoveries around everything from the behavior of the humble electron to complex molecules.

Congressman Neguse helped secure over $2M for JILA as part of Community Project Funding (PCF). The resources provided by the funding will focus, in part, on ensuring JILA’s facilities can precisely control and stabilize temperatures within labs, as many quantum experiments require specific temperatures for success.

The State of Colorado's Economic Development Commission will create two seed grants administered by CUbit that can be used by any Colorado research institution or industry partners. The grants aim to incentivize innovation and develop the quantum workforce of the future.

Individuals from Sandia National Labs will be on campus Friday, September 15 for a day of engaging with faculty, students and staff working in areas aligned with Sandia priority research areas, including quantum.

In a recent Science paper, JILA and NIST researchers—in collaboration with the University of Nevada, Reno and Harvard University—observed novel ergodicity-breaking in C60, a highly symmetric molecule composed of 60 carbon atoms, giving further insight into the quantum dynamics of the system.

The workshop, organized by Professor Gang Cao (Physics) and supported by NSF, brought together over 100 physicists, materials scientists, chemists, and theorists in the quantum materials community, including 32 invited speakers.

As part of the Embark Entrepreneurs in Residence cohort, JILA's Eva Yao will lead FLARI in bringing to market a breathalyzer, invented by Jun Ye, capable of detecting molecules in breath or air samples for fast detection of diseases and contaminants.

"It is a great honor to receive the Vannevar Bush Fellowship," Rey stated. "It is very exciting since it will help push my research on long-lived multilevel atoms in optical cavities. These are extremely complex systems but with tremendous potential to push the frontier of quantum metrology and simulation."