Jun Ye: The Clock That Would Not Lose a Second in 15 Billion Years
Somewhere in a laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, thousands of strontium atoms hang in a lattice of laser light, and each one ticks hundreds of trillions of times a second. The clock they form is so stable that, left running, it would neither gain nor lose a second in roughly fifteen billion years, about the age of the universe. The man who built it, Jun Ye, was born in Shanghai, raised largely by his grandmother, and on 1 October 2026 became a Wolf Prize laureate in physics.
Shanghai, 1967
Jun Ye was born in 1967 in Shanghai. His father was a naval officer and his mother an environmental scientist, and much of his childhood was spent with his grandmother. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1989, then crossed the Pacific to the University of New Mexico, where he completed a master's in theoretical quantum optics in 1991 under Marlan Scully.
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He moved to the University of Colorado Boulder for his doctorate, which he finished in 1997 under John L. Hall, who would share the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on laser precision and frequency combs. After a Millikan fellowship at Caltech with Jeff Kimble, Ye returned to Boulder in 1999 to JILA, the joint institute of the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and became a full fellow in 2001. He has been there ever since.
Teaching Atoms to Keep Time
An atomic clock counts the vibrations of an atom. The higher the frequency and the calmer the atom, the finer the tick. Ye cools strontium atoms to almost absolute zero and traps them in an optical lattice, a grid of standing laser light. Because the atoms barely move, a laser can probe their ultra-stable vibration for a long time, and that vibration becomes the beat of the clock. In 2018 his three-dimensional quantum gas clock reached a fractional precision of 2.5 parts in ten quintillion over about six hours. In 2022 his group used the clock to measure Einstein's gravitational redshift across a sample only a millimeter tall, watching time run slower, ever so slightly, at the bottom than at the top.
Such clocks are not curiosities. They refine satellite navigation and communication, sense tiny changes in gravity and magnetic fields, and test whether the constants of nature are really constant. He also works with frequency combs and quantum information.
The Honors
Ye received the I. I. Rabi Prize in atomic, molecular and optical physics in 2007, election to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2011, the Presidential Rank Award in 2015, the Norman F. Ramsey Prize in 2019, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (announced in 2021, shared with Hidetoshi Katori) and the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honor in 2022. He appeared in the documentary The Most Unknown on Netflix in 2018. At the National Institute of Standards and Technology he holds five Department of Commerce Gold Medals.
Why Jun Ye Is Called a Genius
Ye turned a quiet, nearly impossible discipline into a tool that measures the shape of spacetime in a lab. Most scientists chase new phenomena; Ye chases a smaller error bar, again and again, until the error bar itself becomes the discovery. His clocks do not merely tell time. They tell us, with a precision no one thought reachable, how the universe keeps it.
Achievements
- Wolf Prize in Physics, 2026, shared with Immanuel Bloch
- Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, shared with Hidetoshi Katori
- Optical lattice clock with fractional precision of 2.5e-19, 2018
- Measured gravitational redshift across a millimeter-scale sample, 2022
- Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, 2011
