People: Ariel Sommer

Postdoctoral Fellow
News
Tue September 4, 2012

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

Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics, was awarded a prize for graduate education for his courses 8.421 (Atomic and Optical Physics) and 8.422 (Atomic and Optical Physics II).
News type:
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,
Past Events
Tue November 1, 2016 4:00 pm

Photonic matter in a strong gauge field

Location:Harvard Jefferson 250
Ten Minute Talk:"Quantum spin gyroscope using NV-centers in diamond" by Kasturi Saha

Advances in the control of light propagation and photon-photon interactions have lead to a new notion of photonic materials—states of light that resemble material systems. The greater tendency for light to leave a system, combined with the ability to coherently inject light with a precise frequency and spatial mode, leads photonic materials to operate as driven, open systems. Driven photonic systems can reach steady states that resemble the equilibrium states of thermal systems, providing a route to prepare strongly-correlated many-body states of light. Such correlated photonic states will enable new insights into non-equilibrium many-body physics as well as potential applications to metrology and quantum computation. I will describe our experimental approach to photonic materials, in which we use a degenerate non-planar optical resonator to realize a two-dimensional photon gas with an effective magnetic field, and induce photon-photon interactions by hybridizing the photons with atomic Rydberg excitations. We observe photonic Landau levels indicating a strong effective magnetic field, in addition to a singularity of spatial curvature arising from the effectively conical geometry of our photon gas. Spatial curvature provides a novel probe of quantum Hall states, which we hope to employ in future work on fraction quantum Hall states of light in this system.