In recent years ultracold atomic gases have proven to be a powerful and versatile tool for studying a wide variety of physics.
Our group currently has two experiments, the Sodium atom circuits experiment and the ultracold Strontium experiment. Both experiments are located at the Joint Quantum Institute located on the UMD campus and use ultracold atomic gases to study many-body physics. The atom circuits experiment is currently focused on studying superfluidity and analogs of both superconducting electronics and cosmological physics, whereas the strontium experiment is focused on engineering and studying novel condensed matter systems.
Postdoc Kevin Wright accepts faculty position!
Kevin Wright who has spent the last three years working on the atom circuits experiment will be joining the faculty at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH this winter. Congratulations Kevin!
JQI Fellows Honored by National Institute of Standards and Technology and U.S. Department of Commerce
Four Fellows of the Joint Quantum Institute were recognized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Department of Commerce in the 2011 annual awards ceremonies.
A New Record for Persistent Flow
Three years after NIST’s Laser Cooling and Trapping Group made headlines for the first observation of “persistent flow” – frictionless, superfluid motion – of atoms in an ultracold atomic gas, a new set of group members has set a new record.
They succeeded in keeping a population of sodium atoms rotating around in a toroidal (donut-shaped) trap for 40 seconds. That’s four times the duration of the original 2007 results, and an extremely long time for a quantum-mechanical effect of this sort.