News

Thu April 1, 2010

Martin Zwierlein named ONR Young Investigator

The Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) has named Martin Zwierlein, an MIT assistant professor of physics, as one of its 17 new Young Investigators.
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News type:
Awards
Thu April 1, 2010

Christian Schunck Finalist for the DAMOP Thesis Award

Christian Schunck has been selected a Finalist in the competition for the 2010 APS award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics. The finalist will present an invited talk at the DAMOP meeting in Houston in May 2010.  Christian did his Ph.D. thesis at MIT in Wolfgang Ketterle’s group.
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News type:
Awards
Sat March 27, 2010

Honorary Membership in Deutscher Hochschulverband for Wolfgang Ketterle

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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News type:
Awards
Fri January 1, 2010

How to win a coin game called atomic clock

If you flip a hundred coins, you are unlikely to get exactly fifty heads and fifty tails; there is a statistical uncertainty in the outcome.  Researchers at MIT have reduced the statistical uncertainty in the quantum mechanical equivalent of a coin toss.  This quantum mechanical coin toss is more than a game: its uncertainty limits the precision of one of the world’s most sensitive measurement devices, the atomic clock.  An atomic clock consists of tens of thousands of atoms, each of which can be in either of two states, much like a coin that can show either of two faces.  Each atom is placed in a quantum superposition of the two states—each coin, as it were, suspended in mid-air with the potential to land on either face.  The researchers at MIT use light to probe an ensemble of such atoms in a way that allows them to count how many atoms are “heads” without revealing the state of any individual atom—without disturbing the superposition. Thereafter, the laws of quantum mechanics demand that the count remain the same on any subsequent measurement.  Thus, while each individual coin continues to tumble at random, the tumbling of the different coins is now choreographed: as one twists towards heads, another must turn towards tails.  In the jargon of quantum mechanics, the states of the different atoms are now entangled.  When one ultimately measures the states of the individual atoms—letting the coins land—the statistical uncertainty in the outcome is reduced.  Just such a measurement is used to read out an atomic clock; if the clock is operated in an entangled state, its precision is no longer at the mercy of an ordinary coin toss.

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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri January 1, 2010

States of an Ensemble of Two-Level Atoms with Reduced Quantum Uncertainty

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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri January 1, 2010

Coherent recoilless scattering of atoms

Two papers were finished recently on the subject of recoilless scattering from a gas and scattering from atoms in an optical lattice as a probe of the quantum state of the lattice.
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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri January 1, 2010

Orientation-Dependent Entanglement Lifetime in a Squeezed Atomic Clock

Atomic Clock Beats the Quantum Limit

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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri January 1, 2010

Probing quantum phase transitions at the single-atom level

Physicists Get an Up–Close Look at Synthetic Quantum Materials

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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri January 1, 2010

Probing the Superfluid?to?Mott Insulator Transition at the Single-Atom Level

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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri January 1, 2010

Thermometry and Refrigeration in a Two-Component Mott Insulator of Ultracold Atoms

In this work [1], we describe and analyze theoretically the two techniques of spin-gradient thermometry and spin gradient demagnetization cooling developed earlier by our group [2, 3].
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News type:
Research Highlights