News

Mon January 23, 2012

Viewpoint: Fermion Pairing in Flatland

Hongkun Park and Wolfgang Ketterle have been chosen as the 2016 class of National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows,
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Wed January 18, 2012

“Revealing the Superfluid Lambda Transition in the Universal Thermodynamics of a Unitary Fermi Gas” published in Science, Jan. 12, 2012

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Sun January 1, 2012

Initialization and readout of spin chains for quantum information transport

In these works we studied theoretically and experimentally the many-body dynamics of spin systems and analyzed conditions that would allow for their use in quantum communication.
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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun January 1, 2012

Quantum nonlinear optics with single photons enabled by strongly interacting atoms

We have realized a quantum nonlinear medium that transmits one, but absorbs two photons. This is accomplished by coupling slowly traveling photons in an atomic gas to highly excited, strongly interacting Rydberg states. This result opens not only possibilities for single-photon sources, but may also enable deterministic quantum gates between photons.
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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun January 1, 2012

Mark Ku received a 2012 Harvey fellowship

The 19th ICOLS conference takes place June 8-12 in Hokkaido, Japan, with CUA representation. Vladan Vuletic will report on a joint MIT-Harvard CUA experiment with Mikhail Lukin on switching of light with light using pulses containing only a few hundred photons. For a readable explanation of how to make light interact with light see the...
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News type:
Awards
Sun January 1, 2012

Vacuum-Induced Transparency

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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun January 1, 2012

Compressibility of an ultracold Fermi gas with repulsive interactions

To study the effect of repulsive interactions on the equation of state of a Fermi we have measured the isothermal compressibility of the gas as a function of interaction strength [1].  The strength of repulsive interactions for 6Li atoms can be arbitrarily tuned by varying the magnetic field around a broad Feshbach resonance centered at...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun January 1, 2012

Ultracold Fermionic Feshbach Molecules of 23Na40K

We report on the formation of ultracold fermionic Feshbach molecules of $^{23}$Na$^{40}$K, the first fermionic molecule that is chemically stable in its ground state. The lifetime of the nearly degenerate molecular gas exceeds 100 ms in the vicinity of the Feshbach resonance. The measured dependence of the molecular binding energy on the magnetic field demonstrates...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun January 1, 2012

Heavy Solitons in a Fermionic Superfluid

Topological excitations are found throughout nature, in proteins and DNA, as dislocations in crystals, as vortices and solitons in superfluids and superconductors, and generally in the wake of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. In fermionic systems, topological defects may provide bound states for fermions that often play a crucial role for the system’s transport properties. Famous examples...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun January 1, 2012

Spin-Injection Spectroscopy of a Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gas

The coupling of the spin of electrons to their motional state lies at the heart of recently discovered topological phases of matter. Here we create and detect spin-orbit coupling in an atomic Fermi gas, a highly controllable form of quantum degenerate matter. We reveal the spin-orbit gap via spin-injection spectroscopy, which characterizes the energy-momentum dispersion...
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News type:
Research Highlights