Quantum Scientist Jun Ye Receives Fourth U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal
Recently, the Joint Institute for Experimental Astrophysics (JILA) released two major announcements about Professor Jun Ye: his appointment to the U.S. government's National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee and his award of the 2022 U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal (the highest honor award).
JILA tweets congratulations to Dr. Ye Jun on being awarded the 2022 U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Award
01Jun Ye, who is he?
Jun Ye is currently a JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology Fellow and a Chinese physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, focusing on atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics.
According to Wikipedia, Jun Ye's father was a naval officer and his mother was an environmental scientist, and his highly intellectual family atmosphere allowed him to receive a good education from an early age. He graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in physics; he then began his graduate studies in the United States and completed his master's degree in theoretical quantum optics under the supervision of Marlan Scully at the University of New Mexico in 1991; Jun Ye pursued his PhD in physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and was accepted as the protégé of John L. Hall, who later won the Nobel Prize. He was accepted as a close disciple of John L. Hall, who later won the Nobel Prize.
In 1999, Jun Ye returned to Boulder and JILA as a JILA associate fellow and NIST physicist, and was promoted to full fellow in 2001, where he has been ever since, building a research team in AMO physics and precision measurements.
Jun Ye's research focuses on ultracold atoms, ultracold molecules and laser-based precision measurements; his group has built record-breaking ultra-precise experimental optical atomic clocks.In 2017, Jun Ye's JILA group reported an experimental three-dimensional quantum gas strontium optical lattice clock in which strontium-87 atoms are packed into a tiny three-dimensional (3D) cube with a density 1,000 times higher than previous one-dimensional (1 D) clock by a factor of 1000. The 3D quantum gas strontium optical lattice clock uses an unusual state of matter called a degenerate Fermi gas (quantum gas of Fermi particles), and a synchronized clock comparison between two regions of the 3D lattice produced a record synchronization level of 5 × 10-19 in an average time of 1 hour and a frequency accuracy of 2.5 × 10-19 in 6 hours.
Such a clock could potentially be used to study changes in the Earth's gravitational field, to search for particles of dark matter, to perform quantum simulations of many-body physics, and to study the fundamental nature of light and matter.
Jun Ye's other research focuses include ultra-stable lasers (which are critical to the mechanical properties of his atomic clocks), frequency combs and molecular spectroscopy. 2012 saw his group successfully build the world's most stable laser; and he has pioneered the development of direct frequency comb spectroscopy; in addition, Jun Ye is collaborating with Eric Cornell on an experiment that uses captured ions to measure the electron's electric dipole moment.
02Numerous awards and distinguished academic status
Jun Ye is one of the most cited researchers in the world in the field of experimental atomic physics and has received many awards in the field of science. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, received the Adolph Lomb Medal of the OSA in 1999, the Arthur S. Flemming Distinguished Federal Employee Award in 2005, the Friedrich Wilhem Bessel Research Award of Germany and the William F. Meggers Award of the Optical Society of America in 2006. F. Meggers Award of the Optical Society of America in 2006 ......
In addition, he has received three gold medals from the U.S. Department of Commerce: the Frequency Comb (2001), the Supercooled Molecule (2011), and the Atomic Clock (2014).
In 2011, he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and named a Fru Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, and in 2015, was given a Presidential Rank Award for his work advancing "the frontiers of light-matter interactions with a focus on precision measurements, quantum physics and ultracold matter, optical frequency metrology, and ultrafast science". In 2017, Jun Ye was elected as a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
On this occasion, Jun Ye was awarded the U.S. Department of Commerce's (DOC) 2022 Gold Medal, the highest honorary award bestowed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to recognize outstanding performance that has impacted the mission of the Department and/or one or more operating units with extraordinary, significant or notable contributions. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the medal was awarded in honor of his pioneering work on the optical atomic clock; the citation reads: Einstein's general theory of relativity was further confirmed by the most accurate measurement of gravitational redshift using the optical atomic clock.
Reference links：
[1]https://jila.colorado.edu/news-events/news/jila-nist-fellow-and-university-colorado-boulder-professor-jun-ye-awarded-2022
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun_Ye
[3]https://mobile.twitter.com/jilascience/with_replies.
