¶ News
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¶ Welcome Kishor Kumar Ramavarmaraja
Joining us from Sao Paulo to work with Ashton as a Marsden Funded Research Fellow.
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¶ Welcome Eric Xu, Brianna Nally, Andrew Underwood, and Mathew Denys
Summer students in the AMOQT group, 2018/2019. We hope you enjoy your summer research projects!
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¶ Congratulations Danny!
Congratulations to Danny Baillie, awarded the prize at the annual University of Otago Division of Science Awards Event for his work on self-bound quantum droplets.
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¶ Welcome Sukla Pal
Dr Sukla Pal has arrived to start a 2 year Dodd-Walls postdoctoral fellowship working with Blair and Ashton.
September 2018
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¶ Welcome Stuart Szigeti
We welcome Dr Stuart Szigeti for a six month research visit funded by an Endeavour Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. Stuart is working with Ashton on control theory of finite temperature Bose-Einstein condensates.
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¶ Research Published
Research by Nanako Shitara and Shreya Bir, with Blair Blakie on Domain percolation in a quenched ferromagnetic spinor condensate has appeared in New Journal of Physics.
July 2017
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¶ Contratulations Matt!
Matt Reeves has finished his PhD and taken up a postdoc research fellow position with Matthew Davis' group at the University of Queensland.
January 2017
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¶ Welcome Jingyan Li
We welcome Associated Professor Jingyan Li from Wuhan Textile University for a one year research visit funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor Li is visiting Ashton to study quantum states of superconducting qubit systems.
January 2017
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¶ Welcome Xiaoquan Yu
We welcome new postdoctoral research fellow Dr Xiaoquan Yu, formerly at SISSA, and at Sergej Flach group at NZIAS, Xiaoquan is joining us to work on critical phenomena of in two-dimensional quantum turbulence.
February 2015
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¶ 2015 Exceptional Thesis
The thesis of Otago PhD candidate Sam Rooney has been ranked among the 2015 Exceptional PhD Theses for the Division of Sciences. Sam's PhD research pioneered applications of the open quantum systems approach to dilute-gas Bose-Einstein condensates, leading to significant advances in our understanding of dissipative bosonic matter waves.
A thesis is regarded as of exceptional quality when all three examiners of a candidate's thesis agree that the thesis is of an exceptional standard in every respect – research content, originality, quality of expression and accuracy of presentation – and is amongst the top 10% of theses examined across the Division of Sciences.
Congratulations Sam!
January 2015
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¶ 2014 Hatherton Award
Former PhD student Russell Bisset (now a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory) has been awarded the 2014 Hatherton Award by the Royal Society of New Zealand, for his paper
Fingerprinting Rotons in a Dipolar Condensate: Super-Poissonian Peak in the Atom-Number Fluctuations, published in Physical Review Letters in 2013.
The award is for the best scientific paper by a student registered for the degree of PhD in Physical Sciences, Earth Sciences and Mathematical and Information Sciences at a New Zealand university.
Congratulations Russell!
October 2014
¶ Events
Schedule of events for ICOLS2019 visitors to
Department of Physics,
University of Otago
Science III Building
730 Cumberland Steet
Dunedin
on
Monday 15th of July 2019
including
- Series of 30 minute talks (room 311)
- Departmental Seminar of Aidan Arnold (room 314)
The conclusion of the event will allow time to relocate to the venue for
- Public Lecture of Eric Cornell at the Otago Museum, Beautiful Science Gallery.
This event is supported by Quantum Science Otago
10am-12pm Coffee, Lab Tours, room 311
Lab tours will be led from room 311.
Please email the group leaders directly to express your interest in a lab tour:
- Mikkel Andersen, mikkel.andersen@otago.ac.nz
- Niels Kjaergaard, niels.kjaergaard@otago.ac.nz
- Jevon Longdell, jevon.longdell@otago.ac.nz
- Harald Schwefel (on RSL), please contact nicholas.lambert@otago.ac.nz
12pm - 1.15pm Lunch, Lab 7 (ground floor)
1.15pm Andrew Wilson, NIST (Boulder), room 311
Quantum computers - the real and imaginary parts
This presentation will be an overview of trapped-ion quantum-computing experiments at NIST, including a brief description of lab techniques, current experiments, and future directions.
1.55pm Nanako Shitara, Tokyo Institute of Technology, room 311
Relativistic many-body calculations of the atomic dipole moment of 210Fr for electron electric dipole moment searches
There are many experimental efforts utilising atoms and molecules to measure the electron electric dipole moment (eEDM) which, if observed, would provide direct evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work we use the relativistic coupled-cluster method to calculate the enhancement factor of the atomic EDM in the 210Fr atom due to a nonzero eEDM, which, in combination with experimental results, can provide bounds for the eEDM value.
2.30pm - 3.00pm Afternoon tea, Lab 7 (ground floor)
3.00pm - 4.00pm Aidan Arnold, Strathclyde, room 314
Departmental Seminar (Room 314)
Twisting light to interact with atoms
Structured light, and in particular ‘twisted’ light with orbital angular momentum (OAM), is an important tool for optical manipulation, processing, imaging and both classical and quantum communication. I’ll first discuss how we make twisted light using a spatial light modulator – a programmable phase hologram. We then send tens of milliwatts of twisted light from two lasers at 780nm and 776nm into a hot rubidium vapour and make a milliwatt beam of blue as well as an infrared beam of light via four-wave mixing. Conservation of OAM determines the total OAM carried by the two generated fields – at 420 nm and 5.2 um – but not how it is distributed between them, and we’ll explore what happens.
4.00pm - 4.15pm Discussion and refreshments
4.15pm-4.50pm Zilong Chen, Nanyang Technological University, room 311
Quantum Optics with Laser-Cooled Atoms in a Photonic Crystal Fiber: Atom Interferometry, Long-Lived Coherence, and Quantum State Transportation
Confining atoms in hollow-core photonic crystal fibers has opened up new prospects to scale up the distance and time over which atoms coherently interact with light. By overlapping a Rubidium-85 MOT with the diverging mode of an optical dipole trap or lattice beams from a vertically oriented hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, we can load atoms into the fiber and coherently manipulate their internal and external states. I will present results on atom interferometry, long-lived hyperfine spin coherence time and quantum state transportation using this platform. Our work shows promise in advancing quantum devices using cold atoms to the next level of compactness.
References:
- M. Xin, W. S. Leong, Z. Chen, S.-Y. Lan, Transporting Long-lived Quantum Spin Coherence in a Photonic Crystal Fiber, Physical Review Letters 122, 163901 (2019).
- M. Xin, W. S. Leong, Z. Chen, S.-Y. Lan, An atom interferometer inside a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, Science Advances 4, e1701723 (2018).
5.30 - 7.00pm Eric Cornell Public Lecture (doors open 5.00pm)
Title: Investigating Supersymmetry
By: Nobel Prizewinner Professor Eric Cornell
When: Monday 15 July, doors open 5 pm, talk at 5.30 pm, event concludes 7 pm.
Where: Otago Museum, Beautiful Science Gallery
For more information and to book (free) tickets go to Otago Museum
The sixth meeting in the series Finite-Temperature Non-Equilibrium Superfluid Systems was held at the Edgewater Hotel, Wanaka, New Zealand, on 19-23 February, 2018: FINESS2018. Danny Baillie was on the local organising committee, and Ashton Bradley was the local organizer and chair.
A workshop on cold atoms was held at the University of Otago on 18-19 June, involving 40 participants. Introductory lectures on synthetic gauge fields and quantum vortices were presented by Professor Sandy Fetter. An invited talk on Quantum Kinetic Theory was presented by Professor Crispin Gardiner.
Several presentations are available in pdf format at the workshop webpage.
Happy Birthday BEC!
The fourth meeting in the series Finite-Temperature Non-Equilibrium Superfluid Systems was held at the Rydges Hotel, Queensland, New Zealand, on the 16-20 February, 2013: FINESS2013. Blair Blakie was the local organizer and chair, and Danny Baillie served on the local organising committee.
