Northwestern Events Calendar

May
9
2019

CMP Seminar: Professor Courtney Lannert: Bose Einstein Condensates in a new geometry: thin closed shells

When: Thursday, May 9, 2019
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, F160, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Cristian Pennington  

Group: Physics and Astronomy Condensed Matter Physics Seminars

Category: Academic

Description:

Recent experimental work with “bubble” traps opens up a path to observe BECs in a new geometry: confined to the surface of a sphere. Bubble traps in principle enable a trapped BEC's shape to be continuously tuned between a thin spherical shell and an ordinary harmonically-confined sphere. First, I'll present theoretical and numerical work detailing the collective modes of a bubble-trapped BEC and their evolution between the 2d shell limit and the well-understood 3d spherical limit. We'll see that the frequencies of the collective modes are non-monotonic and produce a signature of the topological hollowing transition that occurs as the sphere becomes a shell. I'll then turn to recent work on achieving a bubble-trapped BEC in the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) on the International Space Station. We'll see that within the confines of the current CAL chip, we lose spherical symmetry, but the microgravity environment should enable us to produce a boundaryless simply-connected 2d condensate.

Professor Courtney Lannert, Smith College and University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Host: William Halperin

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Condensed Matter

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