Deborah Jin

Born on 15 November 1968 in Stanford, California, Deborah Jin was an experimental physicist who produced exotic ultracold condensates of matter. She earned a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1995. Jin began her career studying Bose–Einstein condensates, dilute gases of particles called bosons that are cooled to nearly absolute zero. She worked at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, with Carl Weiman and Eric Cornell, who went on to win the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating the first condensates. Jin then started her own lab at JILA and attempted to cook up a condensate made up of fermions, a difficult task because of those particles’ resistance to bunching together. She and her team succeeded in creating the first ultracold fermionic condensate in 2003. Five years later she helped make the first ultracold gas of polar molecules, an advance she wrote about in the May 2011 issue of Physics Today . All those condensates enable the study of quantum processes, chemical reactions, and exotic phenomena such as superfluidity and superconductivity. Jin won many awards, including a $500 000 MacArthur Fellowship and the Comstock Prize in Physics. She was considered a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Jin died in September 2016 of cancer at age 47. (Photo credit: JILA Scientific Communications)

Date in History: 15 November 1968