Physics / research
Cold atoms as controlled quantum matter
Connect laser cooling, trapping, collisions, condensates, and lattice experiments to tunable many-body Hamiltonians and measurable signatures.
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Module 01 research
Cold atoms as controlled quantum matter
Connect laser cooling, trapping, collisions, condensates, and lattice experiments to tunable many-body Hamiltonians and measurable signatures.
- 01
Doppler and sub-Doppler laser cooling
Balance velocity-selective radiation pressure against recoil diffusion, then identify why multilevel polarization-gradient cooling can beat the two-level Doppler limit.
34 min - 02
Magneto-optical traps and loading
Combine position-selective scattering with velocity damping and extract loading and loss parameters without mistaking fluorescence for an uncalibrated atom count.
34 min - 03
Magnetic and optical dipole traps
Compare state-selective magnetic confinement with conservative light shifts and calibrate Gaussian trap frequencies while accounting for scattering and geometry.
34 min - 04
Evaporative cooling and phase-space density
Track entropy-selective atom loss, rethermalization, and trap geometry to distinguish a colder gas from a more quantum-degenerate gas.
34 min - 05
Feshbach resonances and interaction control
Connect open–closed-channel coupling to the signed field dependence of scattering length and to the universal shallow-dimer binding law.
34 min - 06
Gross–Pitaevskii equation and healing length
Normalize the condensate field, derive a mean-field interaction scale, and identify when a healing length is controlled by dilute-gas physics.
34 min - 07
Bogoliubov excitations in trapped condensates
Linearize condensate dynamics to connect phonons, particle-like excitations, and geometry-dependent collective modes without extending a uniform dispersion beyond its domain.
34 min - 08
Optical lattices and tunneling calibration
Relate lattice spacing, recoil energy, local vibration, and intersite hopping, then calibrate a two-site limit without extending it to an interacting many-body quench.
34 min - 09
Unitary Fermi gases and universal scales
Define density and Fermi scales for a balanced mixture and identify the simultaneous resonance, range, temperature, and state assumptions behind universal thermodynamics.
34 min - 10
Time-of-flight and correlation imaging
Turn an absorption image into a calibrated observable, separating ballistic momentum mapping, thermal widths, pair correlations, and density-dependent loss.
34 min