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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
The near-macroscopic length and time scales (microns and milliseconds) at which quantum behavior manifests itself in cold atoms imply an experimental accessibility that is unusual in quantum many-body physics. The atomic, molecular and optical physics techniques also contribute unique control knobs such as the ability to tune inter-particle interactions, to impose lattice potentials of variable potential height, to apply local potentials that are species specific (felt by one type of atoms, but not by the other) etc... Since the the early days of the observation of dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's), novel techniques have been developed rapidly and new avenues have opened up.In this presentation, we will review some of the new directions that have been demonstrated and/or proposed. Time permitting, we will describe the prospects of probing strong coupling polaron physics with BEC-impurities, of creating impurity-based composite particles in the boson Mott phase of optical lattices, of simulating gauge physics with atoms of coherently coupled spin components, of realizing mutually interacting systems in different dimensions with species specific potentials and of realizing and exploiting dipolar BEC's.
Host: Sanjay Reddy, reddy@lanl.gov