JILA
The joint institute of NIST and CU Boulder, founded in 1962 on the CU campus. One of the world's most concentrated centers of atomic, molecular, and optical physics.
JILA is the joint institute of NIST and CU Boulder, founded in 1962. NIST Boulder is the federal laboratory that co-founded it and anchors the valley's measurement science.
A true joint institute
In 1962, NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder co-founded JILA on the CU campus. JILA was structured as a true joint institute: NIST physicists and CU faculty held shared appointments, used shared labs, and trained graduate students together. The institute became one of the world's most concentrated centers of atomic, molecular, and optical physics.
Two Nobel Prizes
The 2001 prize, shared by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at JILA, recognized the first Bose-Einstein condensate. The toolkit that produced it, ultracold rubidium atoms held in a magnetic trap, is the direct ancestor of Atom Computing's qubit architecture.
The 2005 prize, shared by Jan Hall at JILA, recognized the optical frequency comb. That technique is what makes optical atomic clocks possible, including the clock Infleqtion now operates in Earth orbit.
Downstream: the talent pipeline
Infleqtion (NYSE: INFQ) began as ColdQuanta in 2007, the first commercial spin-out of the JILA toolkit. Atom Computing was founded in 2018 by physicists trained in the JILA tradition, and now reports 1,180 qubits in a 1,225-site neutral-atom array.
When Google Quantum AI hired Adam Kaufman from CU Boulder in 2026 and opened a Boulder office a few blocks from JILA, it was the latest move in a pattern that has been running for two decades: the joint institute keeps producing the people, and the companies keep moving to where those people are.
Active programs today
JILA hosts active groups in ultracold molecules, optical clocks, precision measurement, and quantum many-body physics.
The Nobel lineage
What this lab built
The companies on the map whose technical or human lineage runs directly through NIST Boulder or JILA:
NIST Boulder and JILA sit at the top of this site for a reason: every other organization on the map descends from the work done here. For the full seventy-year timeline, see the Lineage section on the Quantum Valley map.