News

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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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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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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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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Fri November 11, 2011

Institute of Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (ITAMP) accepting applications for 2012 postdoctoral fellowship appointment

Investment in high-power fiber laser technology for industrial processing and military applications has enabled commercial lasers with hundreds of Watts of diffraction-limited output to come to market. These lasers are ideal pump sources for high-power (10s to 100s of Watts), widely tunable optical parametric oscillators which may be tuned from the visible to the mid-infrared...
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Wed November 9, 2011

CUA Remembers Norman Ramsey

November 9, 2011
Tue September 20, 2011

Markus Greiner named MacArthur Foundation fellow

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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