Dr. Lauren M. Aycock defended her thesis today.
Lauren defended her thesis titled “Topological excitations in a Bose gas & sexual harassment reported by undergraduate physicists” today to a bumper audience in Ithaca. And it rocked!
Category: Group News
Tutorial: Synthetic gauge potentials for ultracold neutral atoms
Synthetic gauge fields for ultracold neutral atoms—engineered using the interaction between laser fields and the atoms’ internal ‘spin’ degrees of freedom—provide promising techniques for generating the large (synthetic) magnetic fields required to reach the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) limit in …
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Geometrical Pumping with a Bose-Einstein Condensate
We realized a quantum geometric “charge” pump for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the lowest Bloch band of a novel bipartite magnetic lattice [JQI writeup]. Topological charge pumps in filled bands yield quantized pumping set by the global—topological—properties of the …
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Rockville Science day with Troop 1097
The boys of Boy Scout troop 1097 helped Ian out and presented experiments ranging from magnetism to superconductivity at the 2016 Rockville Science day! In the photo, Michael and Camden are explaining an electromagnet and induced currents!
Celebration of: Magnetic phases of spin-1 spin–orbit-coupled Bose gases
The UMD team got together to celebrate our recent paper “Magnetic phases of spin-1 spin–orbit-coupled Bose gases;” for some reason we went to Town Hall a long-time College Park dive bar. Times were good! Ana, Erin and Dimi were in …
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Original BEC Experiment in Gaithersburg: Vented!
The first Na BEC experiment in Gaithersburg was vented today. This experiment has lead a long and happy life, first creating a Na BEC in 1998, then studying solitons, optical lattices, four-wave mixing, and more recently looking at atoms in …
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Rashba realization: Raman with RF
We theoretically explore a Rashba spin–orbit coupling scheme which operates entirely in the absolute ground state manifold of an alkali atom, thereby minimizing all inelastic processes. An energy gap between ground eigenstates of the proposed coupling can be continuously opened …
Magnetic phases of spin-1 spin–orbit-coupled Bose gases
Phases of matter are characterized by order parameters describing the type and degree of order in a system. Here we experimentally explore the magnetic phases present in a near-zero temperature spin-1 spin–orbit-coupled atomic Bose gas and the quantum phase transitions …
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Interaction-driven exotic quantum phases in spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 bosons
We study the interplay between large-spin, spin-orbit coupling, and superfluidity for bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice, focusing on the spin-1 spin-orbit-coupled system recently realized at the Joint Quantum Institute [Campbell et al., arXiv:1501.05984]. We find a rich quantum phase …
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Feshbach enhanced s-wave scattering of fermions: direct observation with optimized absorption imaging
We directly measured the normalized s-wave scattering cross-section of ultracold 40K atoms across a magnetic-field Feshbach resonance by colliding pairs of degenerate Fermi gases (DFGs) and imaging the scattered atoms. We extracted the scattered fraction for a range of bias …