News: Research Highlights

Thu January 1, 2009

TOPS ?09

TOPS, acronym for Teaching Opportunities in the Physical Sciences, is a program to encourage physics majors to pursue careers in pre college science teaching. The 2009 season marked the seventh year that TOPS has been presented. Sponsored by CUA and NSF, TOPS brings eight undergraduate physics majors—juniors and sophomores from across the nation—to MIT for a six week teaching experience. TOPS participants live together as a group in MIT housing, along with a staff assistant from the former year. The participants work with three experienced high school physics teachers to prepare curricular material, design and practice classes, and then they move into the classroom to teach at the middle school and high school levels. The middle school experience takes place in a one-week class on heat, energy and optics at the Museum of Science, Boston.  The material is then revised and presented at the high school level in a two-week class held at MIT in the TOPS teaching workshop. The high school students come from the greater Boston community. The scientific themes of TOPS are seminal to the research program in CUA.  The PIs and graduate students make presentations on research work in progress and arrange laboratory visits, with the goal of enriching the TOPS experience as well and providing some unique teaching resources.  It appears that  about seventy percent of the TOPS participants go on to teaching careers, and in some cases the participants describe the TOPS experience as having been a decisive factor in their career decision. An article on the TOPS program appeared in Physics Today, October, 2009, p.  8.

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Research Highlights
Thu January 1, 2009

Adiabatic Preparation of Many Body States in Optical Lattices

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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2008

Magnetic trapping of silver and copper, and anomalous spin relaxation in the Ag-He system

M. T. Hummon, W. Campbell, H. Lu, Y. Wang, and J. M. Doyle, Magnetic trapping of atomic nitrogen and cotrapping of NH, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 050702 (2008).
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Tue January 1, 2008

Spin Squeezing on an Atomic Clock Transition

Atomic clocks, the most accurate instruments ever developed, can now operate at the Standard Quantum Limit; their uncertainty dominated by the uncorrelated projection of individual atoms into eigenstates.  Using entanglement, quantum mechanics allows one to correlate the atoms so as to redistribute or squeeze such quantum noise, reducing the uncertainty in a variable of interest.
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Tue January 1, 2008

Precision Measurement of Long Radiative Lifetimes Using Trapped Molecules

Time-Domain Measurement of Spontaneous Vibrational Decay of Magnetically Trapped NH, W.C. Campbell, G.C. Groenenboom, H. Lu, E. Tsikata, J.M. Doyle. Phys Rev Lett 100, 083003 (2008).
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Tue January 1, 2008

Collisions of Ultracold Shaped Atoms in an Optical Trap

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Tue January 1, 2008

Quantum Spin Dynamics of Mode-Squeezed Luttinger Liquids in Two-Component Atomic Gases

A. Widera, S. Trotzky, P. Cheinet, S. Foelling, F. Gerbier, M. D. Lukin, E. Demler, I. Bloch, and V. Gritsev, Quantum Spin Dynamics of Mode-Squeezed Luttinger Liquids in Two-Component Atomic Gases, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 140401 (2008).
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Tue January 1, 2008

Phase diagram of a two-component Fermi gas with resonant interactions

The pairing of fermions is at the heart of superconductivity and superfluidity.  The stability of these pairs determines the robustness of the superfluid state, and the quest for superconductors with high critical temperature is a search for systems with strong pairing mechanisms. Ultracold atomic Fermi gases have emerged as a highly controllable model system for...
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Tue January 1, 2008

Suppression of Inelastic Collisions between Polar molecules with a Repulsive Shield

A. Gorshkov, P. R. G. Pupillo, A. Micheli, P. Zoller, M. D. Lukin, and H. P. Buchler, Suppression of Inelastic Collisions between Polar Molecules with a Repulsive Shield, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 073201 (2008).
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Tue January 1, 2008

New Frontiers in Cold Atom Trapping

N. Brahms, B. Newman, C. Johnson, T. Greytak, D. Kleppner, and J. M. Doyle, Magnetic Trapping of Silver and Copper, and Anomalous Spin Relaxation in the Ag-He System, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 103002 (2008).
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News type:
Research Highlights