Adventures in the Ultracold World

A/Professor Han Pu

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University

11:00 am Tuesday, 18 June 2013, ATC101, ATC Building, Hawthorn.

Atoms can be cooled down to extremely low temperatures --- one millionth degree above the absolute zero or even lower. Quantum mechanics reigns in this ultracold world. Cold atoms not only allow us to explore the fundamental laws of Nature, but also enable technological innovations with huge impact in our society.
A salient feature of cold atoms is their controllability: Almost all relevant parameters (temperature, interaction strength, spatial dimensions, etc.) can be tuned in practice. As such, one can use cold atoms to realize novel quantum phases and to simulate other quantum systems that are much more complicated and difficult to control.
In this talk, I will provide an introduction to the field of ultracold atomic physics, focusing on some of the recent works in my own group and also those carried out in the labs of my colleagues at Rice.

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