Deborah S. Jin
| Deborah S. Jin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 15, 1968 Stanford, California |
| Died | September 15, 2016 (aged 47) Boulder, Colorado |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions |
National Institute of Standards and Technology; University of Colorado at Boulder |
| Alma mater |
Princeton University (A.B.) University of Chicago (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral advisor | Thomas F. Rosenbaum |
| Known for | fermionic condensate |
| Notable awards |
MacArthur Fellowship (2003) Benjamin Franklin Medal (2008) Isaac Newton Medal (2014) |
|
Website Jin Group at Colorado |
|
 “Deborah S. Jin, 2013 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards Laureate for North America”, L’Oréal Foundation |
Deborah Shiu-lan Jin (November 15, 1968 – September 15, 2016) was an American physicist and fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct, Department of Physics at the University of Colorado; and a fellow of the JILA, a NIST joint laboratory with the University of Colorado.
She was considered a pioneer in polar molecular quantum chemistry. From 1995 to 1997 she worked with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at JILA, where she was involved in some of the earliest studies of dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensates. In 2003, Dr. Jin's team at JILA made the first fermionic condensate, a new form of matter. She used magnetic traps and lasers to cool fermionic atomic gases to less than 100 billionths of a degree above zero, successfully demonstrating quantum degeneracy and the formation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate.
Born in Santa Clara County, California, Jin was one of three children, and grew up in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. Her father was a physicist and her mother a physicist working as an engineer.
Jin studied physics at Princeton University, graduating with an A.B. in 1990 and received her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1995 under Thomas Felix Rosenbaum.
In 1995, Jin earned her PhD from University of Chicago with the thesis title "Experimental Study of Phase Diagrams of Heavy Fermion Superconductors with Multiple Transitions".
In 1997, Jin formed a group at JILA, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado. Within two years, she developed the ability to create the first quantum degenerate gas of fermionic atoms. The work was motivated by earlier studies of Bose-Einstein condensates and the ability to cool a dilute gas of atoms to 1 μK. The weak interactions between particles in a Bose-Einstein Condensate led to interesting physics. It was theorized that fermionic atoms would form an analogous state at low enough temperatures, with fermions pairing up in a phenomena similar to the creation of Cooper pairs in superconducting materials.
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