Researchers at JILA, an internationally renowned research and teaching institute operated jointly by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards of Technology, have won federal funding expected to total $15 million over the next five years.
The competitive National Science Foundation grant is the nation's largest in the field of atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics. It will be shared by 18 JILA faculty and will support more than 25 graduate students each year, said CU-Boulder Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman of physics.
Wieman is the co-principal investigator of the grant along with Distinguished Professor Carl Lineberger of chemistry and biochemistry and NIST Senior Scientist Eric Cornell. All are members of the National Academy of Sciences.
"This grant really is the heart of most of what we do here -- it's the central glue that holds a lot of our research efforts together," Wieman said.
The funding award will support many of the experimental programs and related theoretical work at JILA and comes from the NSF program on atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics. JILA has received $2.9 million for the 2001-02 academic year. The continuing annual awards are scheduled to increase to $3.2 million in 2005-06, contingent on the annual congressional budget.
"This is the largest single award that is made in this program," said Richard Pratt, NSF's co-director of the atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics program and a University of Pittsburgh physics professor. The award accounts for more than 10 percent of all AMOP program funding.
"This is a great achievement for JILA, for the university, for NIST and for Colorado," said U.S. Rep. Mark Udall. "JILA's work with CU's undergraduate and graduate students, with industry and with distinguished scientists from all over the world contributes immeasurably to our community and to the advancement of science."
The grant will support world-renowned scientific research at JILA including work on ultracold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensation, the development and use of ultrashort pulse lasers, and fundamental studies of molecular dynamics and chemical reactions.
Senior scientists at JILA are employed either by NIST or CU-Boulder and all have faculty appointments in the CU-Boulder departments of physics, chemistry and biochemistry, or astrophysical and planetary sciences. NIST is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.
Because so many prominent scientists in atomic and molecular physics work at JILA, Lineberger approached the NSF about 30 years ago to propose that the agency provide the researchers with a group grant rather than funding all research proposals by JILA scientists individually. This type of grant allows the money to be divided as the researchers decide. It also provides them the flexibility to respond rapidly to new opportunities and to purchase expensive shared equipment that no single researcher could afford, Wieman said.
NSF has awarded the grant to JILA every year since Lineberger's first proposal. The funding has totaled about $20 million over the past decade and has increased steadily.
CU-Boulder's Ph.D. program in atomic and molecular physics is ranked fourth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is ranked first, followed by Harvard and Stanford.
The institute also strongly supports undergraduate education at CU-Boulder, with many JILA scientists teaching CU-Boulder classes and many undergraduate students working on JILA experiments. It also is a center for collaborative research that brings visiting scientists from all over the world to work with resident scientists for up to 12 months.
JILA was founded in 1962 and employs about 225 people, including graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. It has an annual budget of about $23 million, half of which comes from external research support generated by the scientists who work there. Its central facility is a 10-story tower on the CU-Boulder campus.