UC Berkeley Ultracold Atomic Physics : Home Page

Recent Lab News

06/13 Dr. Jennie Guzman is soon to be Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Cal State East Bay. More to come soon!

06/13 Dr. Thierry Botter begins his post-doctoral fellowship at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Lab. See his JPL profile

1/11 Dr. Sabrina Leslie is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University, focusing on biophysics. See her faculty page.

7/10 Dr. Thomas P. Purdy's Thesis

9/09 Dr. Kater Murch transitions to a postdoc position with Irfan Siddiqi's group at Berkeley.

3/09 Dr. Sabrina Leslie joins Adam Cohen's biophysics group at Harvard University as a Mary Fieser Postdoctoral Fellow.

1/09 Postdoc Dr. Mukund Vengalattore leaves to join the faculty of Cornell University

12/08 Dr. Sabrina Leslie's Thesis

More at Lab news

Popular coverage of our work

Motion generates nonclassical light

Berkeley Lab News Release

Optically measuring quantized collective atomic motion

Optical trap catches atoms swinging in time to theory

Long-time-scale dynamics of spin textures in a spinor condensate

Results highlighted as PRA Kaleidoscope image

Amplification of spin noise in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

Results highlighted as PRA Kaleidoscope image from both experimental and theory papers.

Crystalline magnetic order in a Rb spinor Bose gas

Results highlighted as PRA Kaleidoscope.

Scientific American 60-Second Science Blog: Signs of a supersolid at the March APS meeting

ScienceNow: Is It a Gas, Fluid, Solid, or All of the Above?

¿Es un gas, un sólido, un fluido, o todo a la vez?

Science News: Evidence mounts for an exotic supersolid

Are you in town for ICOLS?

Come visit us! We will be available for lab tours throughout the week. Our labs are in the basement of Birge Hall, just under the large clock tower. Here is a map.

Schedule a time with one of us (most are at the meeting) or just show up and give us a call down in the labs (the phone numbers are listed on each lab's page: E3, E4 and E5) If it's an odd hour, I recommend calling E5 since we are in the midst of a bakeout and most likely here.

Overview

Our research focuses on using ultracold atoms as a resource for studying aspects of condensed-matter and many-body physics, quantum and precision measurement, quantum optics and quantum atom optics. We have three experimental apparatuses which we identify numerically; currently E3, E4, and E5 are active. A new experiment, E6 is also being developed.

E3 employs atomic gases trapped within high-finesse optical resonators to study cavity opto-mechanics and cavity magneto-optics. E4 is pursuing the physics of quantum fluids in annular containers as well as that of a spinor Bose gas and its excitations. Finally, E5 creates a BEC in an optical kagome lattice to try to understand the physical properties that arise in material systems due to this interesting crystal structure.

We are always on the lookout for excellent students, postdocs, and visitors to join our efforts. Feel free to peruse this website and then to contact us for more information. You may also read through several review papers

Recent Research Highlights


Quantization of collective atomic motion	A tunable optical kagome lattice

Observation of ponderomotive squeezing	Linear amplifier model of cavity optomechanics

Equilibrium dynamics of spin textures in a spinor Bose gas	Cavity-aided MRI of atoms in optical lattices

More at Research Highlights