Physics at the Information Frontier: Bose-Einstein Condensate Experiments, Dr Jeffrey Yepez (Maui AFRL/University of Hawaii at Manoa)

Thursday Nov 6, 2014, 3:15 PM → 4:45 PM Pacific/Honolulu

112 (Watanabe Hall)

Through a delicate and elaborate (but now quite well known) procedure of laser and evaporative cooling, ultracold quantum gases can be cooled within the timespan of one second to the nanokelvin temperature range for phase change to a superfluid, the celebrated Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) state of matter theoretically predicted 90 years ago. The first BECs were experimentally realized two decades ago using rubidium atoms, and over these years laser and magneto-optical trap technology (e.g. now including atom chips) has improved so much that today a BEC experimental setup, including all the needed lasers and vacuum cells, can fit into a small platform not much bigger than the size of a conventional digital computer workstation. BECs can be reliably reproduced at a 1Hz rate and thus continually subjected to quantitative experimental testing. The breadth of experimental activity with trapped ultra-low temperature quantum gases is remarkably large and rapidly expanding. So this colloquium talk can cover only a very small portion of the present day activity even after narrowing our focus to the application of analog quantum simulation. We will discuss how engineered BEC Hamiltonians can be used to represent many-body quantum particle behavior governed by various gauge field theories. Presented examples will include relativistic quantum models in 1+1 dimensions (e.g. showing Zitterbewegung, Klein tunneling, and Thirring mode dynamics) as well as nonrelativistic quantum models in higher dimensions with synthetic Abelian and nonAbelian gauge fields. Quantum models in two and three spatial dimensions have interesting soliton solutions (e.g. quantum vortices,Skyrmions, and Dirac monopoles) that can be experimentally explored with spinor BECs. The achievement of Feynman quantum computation is at the information frontier, and incremental steps in this direction are occurring today using trapped and condensed quantum gases with engineered interaction Hamiltonians as a new and efficient analog simulation method for computational quantum field theory. (This talk is intended to be accessible in UH physicists in all subfields)