Deborah Shiu-lan Jin (Chinese: 金秀兰; pinyin: Jīn Xiùlán; 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.
[6] 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.
[14] Jin graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1990, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in physics after completing a senior thesis titled "A Condensation-Pumped Dilution Refrigerator for Use in Cooling Millimeter Wave Bolometer Detectors".
[17] After completing her Ph.D., Jin joined Eric Cornell's group at JILA, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado, as a postdoctoral researcher.
Jin joined Cornell's group soon after they achieved the first rubidium Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and performed experiments characterizing its properties.
[19] The work was complicated by the fact that, unlike bosons, fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state at the same time, due to the Pauli exclusion principle, and are therefore limited with regard to cooling mechanisms.
They directly observed a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate created solely by adjusting the interaction strength in an ultracold Fermi gas of atoms using a Feshbach resonance.
[22] In 2008, Jin and her team developed a technique analogous to angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) which allowed them to measure excitations of their degenerate gas with both energy- and momentum-resolution.