We demonstrate partial-transfer absorption imaging as a technique for repeatedly imaging an ultracold atomic ensemble with minimal perturbation. We prepare an atomic cloud in a state that is dark to the imaging light. We then use a microwave pulse to …
Repeated measurements with minimally destructive partial-transfer absorption imaging Read more »
The creation of particle–antiparticle pairs from vacuum by a large electric field is at the core of quantum electrodynamics. Despite the wide acceptance that this phenomenon occurs naturally when electric field strengths exceed Ec ≈ 1018 V m−1, it has yet to be experimentally …
Physical systems with non-trivial topological order find direct applications in metrology (Klitzing et al 1980 Phys. Rev. Lett. 45 494–7) and promise future applications in quantum computing (Freedman 2001 Found. Comput. Math. 1 183–204; Kitaev 2003 Ann. Phys. 303 2–30). …
Newly minted Ph.D., Dr. Lauren M. Aycock has been award the 2017-2018 APS Congressional Science Fellowship! She will be spending a year working with members of Congress on issues where her experience can support the legislative and political process! Way …
Dr. Lauren M. Aycock awarded the APS Congressional Science Fellowship for 2017-2018 Read more »
Solitons, spatially localized, mobile excitations resulting from an interplay between nonlinearity and dispersion, are ubiquitous in physical systems from water channels and oceans to optical fibers and Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs). From our pulse throbbing at our wrists to rapidly moving …
Brownian motion of solitons in a Bose–Einstein condensate Read more »
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!
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 …
Tutorial: Synthetic gauge potentials for ultracold neutral atoms Read more »
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 …
Geometrical Pumping with a Bose-Einstein Condensate Read more »
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 …
Bringing ultracold atomic gases into the quantum Hall regime is challenging. We engineered an effective magnetic field in a two-dimensional lattice with an elongated-strip geometry, consisting of the sites of an optical lattice in the long direction and of three …