Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

3:30 PM, Friday, April 4, 2008
Room 155, Chem-Phys Building

Dr. Charles Clark
Electron and Optical Physics Division
NIST, Gaithersburg

"Condensed matter physics at nanograms/cubic centimeter''

Ultracold gases confined in optical lattices provide experimentally accessible analogues of important condensed matter systems - even though their densities are typically 100,000 times less than that of air! Optical lattice systems can be produced with almost arbitrary geometries, and with flexible control of the energies for atomic hopping between lattice sites and of the on-site atomic interaction energies. Using such pristine model systems, controlled independent-particle phenomena such as coherent Bloch oscillations and collective effects like the superfluid-Mott insulator transition, have recently been observed with much greater clarity than has ever been attained in traditional condensed matter physics. This field has just entered an era in which it seems possible to use optical lattices to realize many of the iconic model systems of condensed matter physics - such as the Hubbard model and interacting spin models - and thus perhaps solve some of these computationally intractable models through analogue quantum simulation. Moreover, there are opportunities for synthesizing optical lattice "materials" that manifest many of the exotica of conensed matter physics - skyrmions, anyons, quantum hall states, topologial excitations, Kagome lattices, etc. I will discuss recent studies of the interplay between Anderson and Mott localization in optical lattice systems with disorder, and the construction and application of non-Abelian gauge potentials which yield rich physics beyond the quantum Hall effect.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM