Deborah S. Jin, a much-honored physicist who created and explored matter that exists only at a sliver of a degree above absolute zero — or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit — died on Sept. 15 in Boulder, Colo. She was 47.

The cause was cancer, said JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where Dr. Jin worked for 20 years. (JILA was once an acronym for Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics; the organization dropped the longer name in 1995.)

In 2005, Dr. Jin became the second-youngest woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her other honors included a 2003 MacArthur fellowship — the so-called genius award, with a no-strings-attached grant of $500,000 — and the 2013 L’Oreal/Unesco For Women in Science award for North America. She was mentioned as a potential candidate for a Nobel Prize.

Dr. Jin, a daughter of two physicists, had earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago when she moved to Boulder in 1995 to join the laboratory of Eric A. Cornell, a JILA scientist, as a postdoctoral researcher.