Deborah S. Jin 1968-2016: Trailblazer of ultracold science.

Deborah Jin, a pioneer in modern atomic and molecular physics, passed away on September 15, 2016, at age 47, after a courageous fight with cancer. She was a world renowned scientist at JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) in Boulder, Colorado, a joint institute of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado. Her research field was the world of atoms and molecules and their quantum mechanical behavior at temperatures close to absolute zero. Although she was a pioneer in her field, Jin was also humble and modest. She was a role model to many physicists worldwide through her enthusiastic and methodical approach to science. Jin grew up in Indian Harbor Beach, Florida, where ocean waves and rocket launches were the backdrop to her childhood. She became interested in math and science already at a young age, inspired by her physicist parents, and studied physics at Princeton University. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Jin carried out research in condensed matter physics, and received a doctorate in 1995. Here, she met her husband, John Bohn, who also was pursuing a doctorate in physics. For her postdoctoral studies, Jin switched fields to atomic physics and joined the research group of Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at JILA, just when they had prepared the first atomic Bose–EinsteinCondensate (BEC). In the following years Jin was instrumental in studying this novel quantum matter. In 1997, Jin started her own group at JILA and began her road to stardom in a field that had traditionally been led bymale scientists. Within two years, Jin and her team achieved the world’s first quantum degenerate gas of fermionic atoms, in which the atoms form a Fermi sea. This required excellent scientific vision and intuition to identify feasible pathways forward, often resulting in the invention of new experimental methods. In 2003, Jin and her team were the first to condense pairs of fermionic atoms. In this work, Jin was able to directly observe the continuous transition from a Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) state, in which the atoms form strongly correlated Cooper pairs, to a Bose–Einstein condensation of molecules. Her experiments gave unprecedented insight to this novel state of matter at the BCS–BEC crossover, which had never before been observed. Consequently, Jin’s work opened a new field of research: fermionic quantum simulations. Jin showed how a precisely controllable gas of fermionic atoms can be used to explore the physics of strongly correlated electron gases as they appear in superconductors and other solid-state materials. This toolset she devised is now used all around the world. And yet, this incredible success did not stop with atoms. In parallel (2008), Jin teamed up with her colleague, Jun Ye, to tackle the challenge of cooling diatomic molecules. In this “dream team,” Jin and Ye applied their unique, complementary expertise in Deborah Jin in her ultracold atom and molecule lab at JILA. Image courtesy of Dave Neligh (NIST).