Deborah Jin - gone way too soon.

As was pointed out by a commenter on my previous post, and mentioned here by ZapperZ, atomic physicist Deborah Jin passed away last week from cancer at 47.   I don't think I ever met Prof. Jin (though she graduated from my alma mater when I was a freshman) face to face, and I'm not by any means an expert in her subdiscipline, but I will do my best to give an overview of some of her scientific legacy.  There is a sad shortage of atomic physics blogs....  I'm sure I'm missing things - please fill in additional information in the comments if you like.

The advent of optical trapping and laser cooling (relevant Nobel here) transformed atomic physics from what had been a comparatively sleepy specialty, concerned with measuring details of optical transitions and precision spectroscopy (useful for atomic clocks), into a hive of activity, looking at the onset of new states of matter that happen when gases become sufficiently cold and dense that their quantum statistics start to be important.  In a classical noninteracting gas, there are few limits on the constituent molecules - as long as they don't actually try to be in the same place at the same time (think of this as the billiard ball restriction), the molecules can take on whatever spatial locations and momenta that they can reach.  However, if a gas is very cold (low average kinetic energy per molecule) and dense, the quantum properties of the constituents matter - for historical reasons this is called the onset of "degeneracy".  If the constituents are fermions, then the Pauli principle, the same physics that keeps all 79 electrons in an atom of gold from hanging out in the 1s orbital, keeps the constituents apart, and keeps them from all falling into the lowest available energy state.   In contrast, if the constituents are bosons, then a macroscopic fraction of the constituents can fall into the lowest energy state, a process called Bose-Einstein condensation (relevant Nobel here); the condensed state is a single quantum state with a large occupation, and therefore can show exotic properties.

Prof. Jin's group did landmark work with these systems.  She and her student Brian DeMarco showed that you could actually reach the degenerate limit in a trapped atomic Fermi gas.  A major challenge in this field is trying to avoid 3-body and other collisions that can create states of the atoms that are no longer trapped by the lasers and magnetic fields used to do the confinement, and yet still create systems that are (in their quantum way) dense.  Prof. Jin's group showed that you could actually finesse this issue and pair up fermionic atoms to create trapped, ultracold diatomic molecules.  Moreover, you could then create a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecules (since a pair of fermions can be considered as a composite boson).  In superconductors, we're used to the idea that electrons can form Cooper pairs, which act as composite bosons and form a coherent quantum system, the superconducting state.  However, in superconductors, the Cooper pairs are "large" - the average real-space separation between the electrons that constitute a pair is big compared to the typical separation between particles.  Prof. Jin's work showed that in atomic gases you could span between the limits (BEC of tightly bound molecules on the one hand, vs. condensed state of loosely paired fermions on the other).  More recently, her group had been doing cool work looking at systems good for testing models of magnetism and other more complicated condensed matter phenoma, by using dipolar molecules, and examining very strongly interacting fermions.   Basically, Prof. Jin was an impressively creative, technically skilled, extremely productive physicist, and by all accounts a generous person who was great at mentoring students and postdocs.   She has left a remarkable scientific legacy for someone whose professional career was tragically cut short, and she will be missed.