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Jin Wins Service to America Medal
At a Washington, D.C., ceremony on Sept. 28, 2004, Deborah Jin of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) received the Service to America Medal for "Science and the Environment." Jin, a physicist working at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, was chosen as one of eight medal recipients from among 28 finalists in seven different categories. Finalists and winners were chosen from among 496 nominees by a panel of national leaders. The Service to America Medals were created in 2002 by the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan, non-profit organization committed to revitalizing federal government service, and the Atlantic Media Group (publisher of Government Executive, National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly). The "Science and Environment" Medal recognizes a federal employee for a significant contribution to the nation in activities related to science and environment (including biomedicine, economics, energy, information technology, meteorology, resource conservation and space). The medal includes a $3,000 award. Jin received the award for creating "a new form of matter which could potentially unlock the key to superconductivity, a phenomenon with the potential for improving energy efficiency dramatically across a broad range of applications." John Butler, a NIST
research chemist, was a finalist in the Medals' "Call to Service"
category. Butler was recognized for developing new techniques to improve
DNA identification which helped in identifying additional victims of the
World Trade Center attacks. The following is an excerpt from the awards ceremony program. Quantum Matchmaker Physicist Deborah Jin brought unsociable atoms together to create a new form of matter. By Beth Dickey Late last year, Deborah Jin coaxed several hundred thousand fiercely antisocial atomic particles to dance as partners in a very, very cold gas. What resulted was one of the most sought-after, bizarre and basic forms of matter, giving scientists a potential key to unlock the secrets of superconductivity. Jin, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., led a team in creating the first Fermi condensate on Dec. 16, 2003. Their work has been described as a crucial first step in developing superconductors that work at room temperature. Superconductors, which transmit electricity without any energy loss, aren’t widely used because it costs too much to keep them sufficiently chilled. At room temperature, however, they could lead to faster computers, smaller cell phones, lower electric bills and heretofore unimagined technologies. Jin has developed a tool to help scientists understand the basic physics behind them. “We’ve opened a door. We don’t know where it will lead,” says Jin, who also teaches at the University of Colorado. One thing is certain: The 35-year-old daughter of physicists and mother of a toddler, Jin has become a role model for young women in a discipline dominated by men. Her creation builds on an earlier achievement that earned two NIST colleagues a share in the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics. In 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman created a similar form of matter by trapping and cooling bosons, one of two essential kinds of atoms, until the particles huddled together and behaved identically, like a single super atom. Their creation kicked off an intense race to condense the other essential kind of atoms, fermions. Jin won the race, enticing normally repellent atoms to pair up like electrons in a superconductor. Unlike bosons, fermions avoid each other when refrigerated to the extremes necessary for superconductivity. Jin—who won a $500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation last year—got around that by using a magnetic field as a fine-tunable Cupid, forcing loner atoms to pair up, and controlling the strength of the pairing by adjusting the magnetic field. As pairs of fermions began behaving like bosons, they coalesced into a novel form of matter. “The strength of pairing in our fermionic condensate,” Jin says, “would correspond to a room-temperature superconductor.” Not everyone agrees with her,
but Cornell hails the feat as a “major breakthrough.” He notes
that it was much more difficult than the one that inspired it. “I
was interested,” he says, “but I thought it would be too hard.”
See also: A-Z Subject Index, NIST Home Page Created:
09/29//04
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