News

Tue January 1, 2013

Many-body Localization with Dipoles

Systems of strongly interacting dipoles offer an attractive platform to study many-body localized phases, owing to their long coherence times and strong interactions. We explored conditions under which such localized phases persisted in the presence of power-law interactions and supplemented our analytic treatment with numerical evidence of localized states in one dimension. We proposed several...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Spin-Orbit Suppression of Cold Inelastic Collisions of Aluminum and Helium

Cold collisions between atoms play a critical role in much of atomic physics, being responsible for few-body interactions, thermalization, trap loss and decoherence.  The development of a detailed understanding of collisions is therefore crucial to the continued expansion of the field into new atomic systems, an expansion that has already led to the discovery of...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Beyond Universal Long-Range van der Waals Interactions with Ultracold 6Li2 Molecules

We have found that collisional loss of ultracold 6Li2 molecules can be determined by physics beyond universal long-range van der Waals interactions [1]. Starting with a degenerate Fermi gas of 6Li produced by sympathetic cooling with bosonic 23Na, we form Li2 molecules by a magnetic field sweep around a narrow Feshbach resonance. The resulting molecules...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Stretchable Photonic Crystal Cavity with Wide Frequency Tunability

We reported a new approach for the realization of a flexible photonic crystal (PC) cavity that enabled wide-range tuning of its resonance frequency. Our PC cavity consisted of a regular array of silicon nanowires embedded in a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix and exhibited a cavity resonance in the telecommunication band that could be reversibly tuned over...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Single-photon Nonlinearities in Two-mode Optomechanics

We presented a detailed theoretical analysis of a weakly driven, multimode optomechanical system, in which two optical modes were strongly and near-resonantly coupled to a single mechanical mode via a three-wave mixing interaction. We calculated one- and two-time intensity correlations of the two optical fields and compared them to analogous correlations in atom-cavity systems. Nonclassical...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Progress on Laser Cooling of CaF

The internal structure and the long-range dipole-dipole interactions of ultracold polar molecules open new avenues in studying physics such as the quantum simulation of strongly correlated Hamiltonians, ultracold controlled chemistry or precision measurements. At present, a reliable general method to produce an ultracold sample of molecules is desired, but not available. The goal of this...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Targeted Delivery of Nanodiamonds into Living Cells

Techniques developed in AMO physics has long served as foundations for various imaging modalities in chemistry and biology. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one such example: through the mapping of proton nuclear spin resonances under the magnetic field gradient, MRI enables both structural and functional imaging of our bodies in an unprecedented detail. Magnetometry using...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Experimentally efficient methods for estimating the performance of quantum measurements

In this work we proposed metrics to characterize the performance of quantum measurements and provided experimentally accessible and efficient protocols to estimate these metrics. This work thus fills a gap in the characterization of quantum operations, which has until now focused on just the system evolution (via techniques such as quantum process tomography) providing a...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Keldysh Approach for Non-equilibrium Phase Transitions in Quantum Optics: Beyond the Dicke Model in Optical Cavities

We investigated nonequilibrium phase transitions for driven atomic ensembles interacting with a cavity mode and coupled to a Markovian dissipative bath. In the thermodynamic limit and at low frequencies, we showed that the distribution function of the photonic mode was thermal, with an effective temperature set by the atom-photon interaction strength. That behavior characterized the...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 1, 2013

Phonon-induced Spin-Spin Interactions in Diamond Nanostructures: Application to Spin Squeezing

We proposed and analyzed a novel mechanism for long-range spin-spin interactions in diamond nanostructures. The interactions between electronic spins, associated with nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, were mediated by their coupling via strain to the vibrational mode of a diamond mechanical nanoresonator. That coupling resulted in phonon-mediated effective spin-spin interactions that could be used to generate...
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News type:
Research Highlights