4/7/2008: Joint group meeting with Dr. Zheng-Tian Lu's group from Argonne National Laboratory. Zheng-Tian's post-doc gave a talk on their project to probe violation of  time-reversal symmetry by measuring electric dipole moment of ultracold radium atoms. .

4/4/2008: Open house for perspective graduate students. We prepared two posters to showcase our Cs BEC and Cs-Li  mixture experiments and gave a presentation on the atomic physics research programs at the University of Chicago.

4/2/2008: William Sweeney  joined our group as an undergraduate research assistant

4/1/2008: New paper on "Fast, runaway evaporation to Bose-Einstein condensation in optical traps"

3/10- 15/2008: APS March meeting. Dr. Nathan Gemelke gave a talk on " Investigating Universal Few-body Physics based on Bose-Einstein Condensates of Cesium Atoms in Optical Lattices." Chen-Lung presented a poster on "Bose-Einstein Condensates of Cesium Atoms in Optical Lattices."

3/10/2008:Going away party for Chilean exchange student Mr. Daniel Rivas. Daniel, Kathy-Anne, Arjun, Scott, Xibo and Cheng went to Seven-Ten for dinner.

3/03/2008: Kathy-Anne gives HEP lunch seminar talk on Quantum Computing using trapped ions.

1/28/2008: Skyler  Degenkolb joined our group as an undergraduate research assistant

1/7/2008: Kara Lamb joined our group to work on a graduate research project

1/7/2008: Chilean visiting student Daniel  Rivas joined our group

1/12008: Cheng Chin is awarded the NSF CAREER grant on "Few-body universality study using ultracold atoms in optical lattices" .

12/11/2007:  Workshop on "Bose-Einstein Condensation and Quantized Vortices in Superfluidity and Superconductivity"
Invited by Prof. Jiangbin Gong, I gave an invited talk at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore. During this trip, I also met my old colleague at Stanford, Keng-yeow Chuang , who is now a professor at the Physice department of NUS.   (Cheng Chin)

12/6/2007: Seminar talk at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan
Invited by Prof. Ite-Yu, I gave a seminar talk on the "Enhanced sensitivity to  the variation of fundamental constants in ultracold collisions of atoms and molecules near Feshbach resonances". (Cheng Chin)

11/19/2007~11/23/2007: Visit NIST at Gaithersburg
I went to NIST and joined Paul Julienne, Eite Tiesinga, Rudolf Grimm to work on a review paper. (Cheng Chin)

<>11/9/2007: Experiment Progress:  Bose-Einstein condensation of cesium atoms, 3D images of BECs

11/3/2007: Midwest Cold Atom Workshop II at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
Invited by Prof. Thad Walker, we (Chen-Lung, Xibo, Arjun, Scott, Kathy-Anne and Cheng) went to Madision to attain the workshop.

10/19/2007: Friday afternoon lecture for first year graduate students.

10/1/2007: Dr. Kathy-Anne Brickman joined our group
Our new postdoc and the first MRSEC postdoc fellow joined us!! Kathy-Anne graduated from the University of Michigan and is an expert in cooling and trapping of atoms and ions and quantum computation. I am very glad we will be working together to start a brand new project.

9/30/2007~10/13/2007: Prof. Serge Haroche from College de France and ENS, Paris visited us.
Prof. Serge Haroche gave a series of lectures, including
  10/2: colloquium talk on "Counting Photons Without Detroying Them: An Ideal Measurement of Light"
   10/3: undegraduate lecture on "Atom-photon interactions"
   10/8: seminar talk on "Exploring the quantum dynamics of atoms and photons in cavities (I)"
   10/9: seminar talk on "Exploring the quantum dynamics of atoms and photons in cavities (II)"
   10/10: undergraduate lecture on "Manipulating atoms with lasers"

9/14/2007: Going-away party for Robert Berry

9/5/2007~9/8/2007: Packard Fellow Meeting in Monterey

8/19/2007~8/24/2007: Visit NIST at Gaithersburg
I went to NIST and joined Paul Julienne, Eite Tiesinga, Rudolf Grimm to finish up our work on the review paper.

8/17/2007: Going away party for Emily Garza at Seven-Ten
Bob, Ryan, Chen-Lung, Xibo and I joined the party and thanked Emily for her excellent works in our group.

8/6/2007~8/10/2007: Summer School On Experimental Cold Atomic and Molecular Physics
I gave four talks in the summer school at the East China Normal University in Shanghai. I also visited Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Peking University and Tsing Hua university. In Tsing Hua, I visited Prof. Chen Ning Yang (Ph.D. at U. of Chicago, 1948, Nobel Prize in 1957).

7/28/2007: Group dinnner at Buca di Beppo
Vicky, Nate, Arjun, Scott's wife, Scott, Emily, Bob, Ryan, Chen-Lung, Xibo, Dennis and I had an Italian dinner in downtown to welcome new members in the group.

7/19/2007: http://www-news.uchicago.edu/citations/07/070719.chin-wired.html

7/9/2007: Mr. Scott Waitukaitis joined our group for summer research

7/1/2007: Mr. Arjun Sharma joined our group for summer research.

6/21/2007: International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, Columbus
    A presentation on the recent progress in ultracold molecules is delievered in this meeting. I am happy to see and talk to Dr. Paul Julienne, Prof. Olivier Dulieu and Prof. Dave deMille.

6/11/2007: REU student: Emily Garza
Ms. Emily joined our group to conduct a REU research project on the control of optical lattices.

6/7/2007: DAMOP, Calgary
I gave two talks on "Enhanced sensitivity to fundamental constants in ultracold atoms and molecules near Feshbach resonances" and "Ultracold molecules: energy structure and scattering length".

6/4/2007: Going away party for Martin Jankowiak and Robert Berry
We went to Seven-Ten at 7pm to have the party for Martin and Bob. Both Martin and Bob have contributed significantly to our project and we wish them have a bright career after they graduate from the University of Chicago.

4/23/2007: Dr. Jamie Kerman visited us
I am more than extremely happy to see Jamie, whom I have worked with for many years. Jamie delivered a talk on "Superconducting NbN-nanowire single photon detector" in our MRSEC special seminar.

4/20/2007: Nathen Gemelke and Edina Sarajlic visited us
I am extremely happy to see Nate and Edina, whom I have known for many years. Nate will join our group as a Grainger postdoc research fellow.

4/16/2007~4/18/2007: Visit NIST at Gaithersburg
I went to NIST and joined Paul Julienne, Eite Tiesinga, Rudolf Grimm to finish up our work on the review paper.

4/13/2007:  Visit Northwestern University
    Invited by Prof. Anupam Garg, I visited the Physics Deparment of Northwestern University and presented a colloquium talk on our cold atom research. I had a great time discussing some new ideas with Anupam, Dr. Jih-Chiang Tsai, Prof. Hui Cao, Prof. William Halperin, Prof. John Ketterson...

4/6/2007:  Open House and lab tour
    In the open house, I introduced the experimental research programs at UC on atomic physics and hard condensed matter physics to prospective students. We also prepared two lab tours for students who are interested in ultracold atoms and molecules.

2/15/2007:  UC press release on the Packard fellowship

1/22/2007:  New paper
We performed a precise measurement in Rudi's group at Innsbruck University on the collective excitation frequency and the damping rate in the BEC-BCS (Bose-Einstein condensate to Bardeen Cooper Schreiffer superfluid) crossover regime. Our result supports the quantum Monte Carlo calculation and is consistent with the prediction made by Lee and Yang some 50 years ago.
In simple words, Lee and Yang's calculation suggests that an interacting Bose quantum gas should have a lower compressibility than people expected based on mean-field theory.

1/3/2007~1/9/2007:  Visit NIST at Gaithersburg
I am happy to see many people at Gaithersburg, including Paul Julienne, Eite Tiesinga, Carl Williams, Rudolf Grimm, Jabez McClelland, Bill Phillips, Chris Helmerson, Trey Proto, Charles Clark, Yuju Lin, Adam Black...  I hope we will finish our project soon.

11/1/2006: Cheng Chin received Packard Fellowship

10/09/2006: HEP seminar
Ed (Bucher) invited me to give a HEP seminar talk on "the enhanced sensitivity on the variation of fundamental constants in cold atoms and molecules near Feshbach resonances".

10/05/2006: Visit Toledo University
Invited by Prof. Bo Gao, I went to Toledo univeristy and gave a talk on cold atom expeirments in the strongly interacting regime. It was nice to meet Bo, whose theory first predicted the bunching of s-, g- and l-wave Feshbach resonances in cesium atoms.

9/30/2006: Going-away party for Selim
From 2 to 6pm, we had a party in my flat for Selim, who has stayed with us for two months. We had a major vegetarian hot pot and special dessert made by Selim. Previous night we also had a group buffet and later we went to a Jazz bar and had a great time. It is great to have Selim with us during the construction of the expeirmnet.

9/28/2006: Moving to CIS building!
We moved into our new laboratories in the CIS (Center for Integrative Science) building today. The new building has passed all the tests on vibrational noise, acoustic noise, temperature and moisture controls. We really look forward to setting up our system in the new lab and can start doing expeirment!

9/03/2006~9/12/2006: The 4th COE sumposium on Physics of Self-Oranization Systems
Invited by Prof. Kurihara and Prof. Terasaki, I gave a talk on degenerate Fermi gases at Waseda university. I also visited Takahashi's Yb and Rb groups in Kyoto University, Katori's precision measurements in optical lattices and Inouye's K-Li mixture experiments in Tokyo University. I gave 4 talks in Japan and had interesting discussions with Prof. Yoji Ohashi and Prof.Ueda. After Japan, I visited Prof. Tsai's group in NCKU, visited Dr. Ho in IAMS, Academic Sinica in Taiwan and gave two talks. 

8/29/2006: Going-away party for Shuo Hao in 7-10.

8/27/2006: Assemble the main chamber
With Jeff, Xibo and Selim, we assembled the chamber on Sunday. We are very happy everything went well and it looks really cool.

8/20/2006: Group BBQ
Sunday afternoon... beautiful weather... Chen-Lung, Shuo, Selim, Dennis, other friends of theirs and I went to lakeshore (Michigan lake) and had a summer BBQ party. :)

8/10/2006: Group trip: Chicago White Sox vs. New York Yankee in the US Cellular Field
Dennis, Chen-Lung, Eric, Gilbert (visitor), Bob and I went to the game. White Sox won.

8/8/2006: Prof. Johannes Hecker Denschlag from Innsbruck University visited us
Johannes and his wife Nancy came to Chicago area and I am very happy to meet them and learned more about Johannes' recent exciting results. He gave a talk on "Repulsive atom pairs in an optical lattice"  which is fascinating. After his talk, we had an hour-long discussion with Kathy's and mine students.

8/2006~10/2006: Prof. Selim Jochim from Heidelberg University in Germany joins us
I am very glad Selim joins us for 2~3 months and will help us constructing the experiments. I know Selim since 2003 and am very happy he can come here and discuss various ideas with us on cold atoms and moleucles.

8/1/2006~8/3/2006: Policy meeting on Quantum Optics and Cold Atoms in Shanghai
Invited by CAS Shanghai branch, SIOM and ECNU, I attained the meeting to discuss future research on quantum optics and cold atoms in Shanghai. After the meeting, I visited the impressive experiments in ECNU led by Prof. Ma and Prof. Yin.

6/18/2006~6/23/2006: Gordon Research Conference on Correlated Electron Systems
Invited by Prof. Seamus Davis, I went to GRC in Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA and gave a talk on "Collective and single particle excitations of a strongly interacting Fermi gas"

6/14/2006~6/16/2006: Meeting on Strong Correlations in Fermi systems,
Invited by Prof. Chris Pethick, I went to Nordita and the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark and gave one talk for Rudi on "Precision collective excitation measurements in the BEC-BCS crossover regime" and one on "Pairing Gaps in the BEC-BCS crossover regime".

5/30/2006~6/4/2006: VIST NIST
Rudi and I went to NIST to work on our review paper with Paul Julienne and Eite Tiesinga.

5/25/2006: Our paper (cond-mat/0603607) accepted by Physical Review Letters
This paper shows a new application of cold atoms and molecules. Victor and I found that cold collision properties can be extremely sensitive to the Strong interaction to Electromagnetic interaction ratio. In particular, for cesium atoms near a narrow Feshbach resonance, a small change of the ratio by 1 part per trillion (10^-12) can lead to a 0.1%~10% change in the scattering length. 

5/23/2006: Visit Argonne
Invited by Dr. John Schiffer, I gave a talk at Argonne National laboratory on Efimov states.

5/16/2006~5/20/2006: DAMOP meeting
Chen-Lung and I attained the meeting. I presented a talk on the "Energy Structure of Feshbach and Efimov Molecules" and chaired an inivited session on "Ultracold molecules".

5/7/2006: OCPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award.
It is my great honor to receive the OYRA award from the Oversea Chinese Physics Association.

5/4/2006: Prof. Christopher Monroe visited us.
Prof. Monroe from University of Michigan gave a fascinating talk on "Quantum Network and Ion trap quantum computer" in our physics colloquium.

4/23/2006~4/25/2006: Visit Ohio State University
Prof. Jason Ho invited me to give a talk on the Efimov state. I discussed with him, Prof. Eric Braaten, Prof. Greg Lafyatis, Prof. Mohit Randeria, Roberto Diener and Hui Zhang on many interesting topics we can study in the future. 

4/13/2006: Prof. Moses Chan visited us.
Prof. Chan gave a fascinating talk "Can Solid be a superfluid?" in our physics colloquium.

4/7/2006: Visit Purdue University
I visited Prof. Jiangping Hu at the Purdue University and gave a talk on the Efimov state. I knew Jiangping since I was a graduate student.

4/3/2006~4/4/2006: Prof. Victor Gurarie visited us.
Prof. Victor Gurarie gave a talk at the JFI colloquium on "Fermi gases with Feshbach resonant interactions". He visited our lab and we had long interesting discussions on future Fermi gas experiments.

3/27/2006: New paper
Prof. Victor Flambaum and I wrote this paper, "Enhancement of variation of fundamental constants in ultracold atom and molecule systems near Feshbach resonances", cond-mat/0603607.

3/20/2006: Dr. Yuh-Lin Wang visited us.
Dr. Yuh Lin Wang is the Director of the Institute of  Atomic and Molecular Sciences (IAMS) in Taiwan and is also an alumni of Univ. of Chicago.

3/16/2006: Alfred P. Sloan fellowship
It is my honor to receive the fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Wendy Zhang also got the fellowship, see here.

3/16/2006: "Evidence for Efimov quantum states" on Nature magazine
    When three identical bosons interact, a set of universal three-body bound states are predicted in the quantum threshold regime (meaning at very low temepratures). These states, called Efimov states, were predicted in 1970 and are now evidenced in the Innsbruck expeirment. More details on our paper and the Efimov physics are here.

3/12/2006 ~ 3/17/2006: APS March meeting
    I chaired the focus session on "Strongly interacting Fermi gases and BCS-BEC crossover" on 3/13 and gave a contributed talk on "Mean-field model on condensates in the BEC-BCS crossover."

3/8/2006: Discussion with Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle from MIT
    Prof. Wolfgang realized Bose-Einstein condensation of sodium atoms in 1995 and won the Nobel prize in 2001. His groups in MIT have been extremely productive over the past decade and today he reported exciting news from his Na, Rb and Li experiments in a special seminar talk. In the afternoon, we had two informal discussion sessions with him. Students from my and Kathy's group have the chance to talk to him and ask him about the technical details of the experiment. We also presented to him the progress of our current research and future research direction. He also visited our laboratory in CIS and the new apparatus we are building with much interest. 

3/7/2006: EXPERIMENT PROGRESS: Reference laser control
    Reference laser is the most critical laser in our setup which provides the absolute frequency reference for all the other trapping and cooling lasers. After working on this laser for quite some time, we now successfully set up a polarization spectroscopy based on two photo-diodes. Near a hyperfine transition, we observe signal varies dispersively over a range of 40MHz with a signal-to-noise of >200. A stability of ~200kHz is deduced, which is sufficiently small compared to the natural linewidth of 5MHz. Further inprovements are in progress.

3/7/2006: I gave a JFI colloquium talk on ultracold molecules and the Efimov state
    Our paper in Nature will be published on 3/16/2006.

3/2/2006: Prof. Gordon Baym from UIUC visited us
    One of Prof. Gordon Baym's many interests is on degenerate Fermi gases,  in particular, its relevance to quark-gluon plasma. At sufficiently high temperatures, the up quarks and down quarks inside the nucleus or neutron stars are freed and strongly interact with each other via gluon exchange. Since quarks are fermions, this system might be simulated by strongly interacting fermionic atoms. I learned quite a bit from talking to Gordon everytime I meet him. In the afternoon, he gave a colloquium talk about the story of Bohr and Heisenberg, both of them have decisive influence in physics and in "atomic sciences".

2/24/2006~2/27/2006: CIAR UltraCold Matter workshop in Banff, Alberto
    Prof. Allan Griffin invited me to the workshop supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Several Canadian experiment groups, especially the one led by Joseph Thywissen, reported interesting results on degenerate quantum gases. Many invited speakers also showed exciting prospects of cold atom research. I am very glad to meet many old friends here, in particular, Allan, Christopher Salomon, Gora, Jason, Jeff, Florian and Henning. I gave the last talk on the Feshbach molecule structure and the Efimov state on Sunday. In the aftenroon, I went hiking with and talked to Christopher, Kirk, Florian, Henning... Everybody is working on a new project! The second day, 2/27, Tony, Jason, Brian and I took the same flight back to Chicago. The flight was seriously delayed for 4 hours. Among all the anxiously-waiting passengers, four physicists were having a good time chatting.

2/14/2006 and  2/16/2006:   Prof. Jun Ye visited us
    Prof. Ye from JILA, NIST and Univ. of Colorado leads one of the most productive groups in AMO which conducts SEVERAL ground braking experiments in frequency combs, cooling and trapping cold molecules and atomic frequency standard, to name a few. We are very happy he came here and give two colloquium talks, one at the JFI and one in the physics department. In his talks, he showed the amazing link between the ultra-precise laser spectroscopy to the complex and fast dynamics of molecules. We had very interesting discussions on possible experiments on ultracold alkali atoms and molecules. I think cold molecules will be far more useful than people imagine nowaday.

2/9/2006~2/10/2006:   MRSEC site visit
    Being part of the Seed Project in the Chicago MRSEC with Kathy' group, our group prepared a poster and a short presentation on our research direction. The director Heinrich Jaeger did a great job to coordinate this site visit. Although very few people came to our poster, I strongly believe research on cold atoms will provide new insights into important issues in many-body systems, condensed matter and possibly material sciencel. The reason is that cold atoms are clean, extremely well characterized, free from impurity, and can be confined to simulate strongly correlated or interacting electroncs in condensed matter, fermions in nano-particles, nucleons in atomic nucleus...

2/2/2006~2/8/2006:   Visit NIST and University of Maryland
    I am very glad to meet and talk to Paul Julienne, Eite Tiesinga and Rudolf Grimm about our paper. We had discussions for a few days on its structure and how we share the tasks to finish it. At NIST, we visited several exciting experiments of Bill Phillips's on Rb and Na BECs, Jabez's on Er and Carl Williams's on "GHz quantum teleportation". At the university of Maryland, the expeirments on cold plasma, cold atoms and the superconductor-based quantum manipulations are extremely interesting. Rudi gave an impressive talk on strongly interacting Fermi gas and on Efimov state at their new Joint Quantum Institute. In this trip, I am particular happy to see Rudi and Adam Black, who is now a postdoc in Bill's group. Rudi and I went to a pretty good Korean/Japanese restaurant on 2/7 and I am happy to hear from him that all the Innsbruck guys are doing very well.

1/31/2006:   CM-AMO Sesminar Talk at the University of Michigan
    Prof. Luming Duan and Prof. Michal Zochowski invited me to give a talk on the ultracold molecules and Efimov states. I also visited the labs of Prof. Christopher Monroe and of Georg Raithel. Their experiments on photon-atom entangelement and on quantum gases on the chip are very interesting. I also discussed with Luming on several ideas in Fermi and Bose systems. After the talk, they invited me to a very nice Chinese restaurant. I wish there is also a good Chinese restaurant around U. of Chicago. 

1/15/2006~1/21/2006:   Aspen Physics Workshop on Strong Correlations in Ultra-Cold Fermi Systems
    I will be attending the first cold atom meeting in 2006 in Aspen. Obvioiusly research on ultracold Fermi gas near resonances is one of the hottest topics these days. In particular, Cooper pairing and fermionic superfluidity, universally existing in degenerate Fermi systems with attratctive interactiions, can now been investigated with unprecidented details and wide range of parameters. I look forward to hearing more recent progress on ultracold Fermi and Bose gases. However, I wish it is not too cold in Aspen...

12/30/2005~12/31/2005 : 60th Anniversary of NTU Taida Physics
    I have the great honor to give a talk in this special meeting on the 60th Birthday of the Physics Department in National Taiwan University, from which I got my Bachelor's degree. In the meeting held by the Chair Prof. Chang, Prof. Hsiung and Prof. Hwang at NTU, I visited my college teachers as well as several alumni, many of them are very successful in academic research, as well as in industry, financing, education and even politics... One of the important figures in Taiwan high-tech industry, Dr. Tsai, received her Ph.D. in the Physics Department of U of C. I gave a talk on the first day, "Bottom-up Quantum Simulation and Synthesis of Complex Objects based on Ultracold Atoms."

11/22/2005 : Prof. Victor Flambaum visited us
    I read his paper on effective range theory when I was a student at Stanford! Many years later I had the honor to invite him to give a JFI colloquium talk. His works cover a broad range of physics and so did his talk here. The topic of his talk "Effects of variation of fundamental constants from big bang to atomic clocks" attracted audience from JFI, EFI as well as astronomy and astrophysics center. Victor and I had long discussion in the morning on new experiments we can do with ultracold molecules and molecular condensates. We had several very interesting ideas, which further strengthen my belief that cold molecules will explore a brand new and exotic quantum world not seen by cold atoms. In the afternoon, Victor talked to Jonathan Rosner and Donald York. Tom Witten and I went to dinner with him. BTW, I think he is probably the first speaker who took CTA bus to UC.

11/19/2005 : Midwestern Cold Atom Workshop
    Brian deMarco, Zheng-Tian Lu and I organized this workshop and brought together eight experiment groups from UIUC, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Northwestern University, Western Illinois University, and us at UC to present our research progress. Jeff, Chen-Lung, Selim Jochim (our postdoc candidate) attained the meeting (Bob overslept and missed it!) We also brought a poster on our new apparatus. It was very nice to meet all the local groups working on cold atoms and hear all the interesting results from our neighbors. Hopefully soon we will also get our new experiment running. In the evening, we went to a Chinese restaurant with Tse-Chieh Wet (My old friend at UIUC) and another friend of Selim.

11/16/2005~11/18/2005 : Prof. Vladan Vuletic visited us
    I was really happy to see Vladan, and his colloquium talk in the Physics department on "Single photons stored in many entngled atoms" was really enlightening.  (Isaac Abella and Bruce Winstein were particularly interested.) I worked with Vladan at Stanford for six years on various projects including optical cooling, Feshbach spectroscopy and BEC on atom chips. I always love discussions with him which are always stimulating and frequently lead to unexpected new ideas. I also benefited from him very much on how to conduct serious and careful experiments, but with wild and unlimited imagination. (Although I never understand how he could just knock on the malfunctioned instruments and bring them back to life.) Now that I am in Chicago, I wish I will have more chance to meet him.

11/11/2005 : 2005 MidWest Regional Meeting on Quantum Gases
    Kathy Levin, Brian deMarco, Jason Ho and I are organizing the first regional meeting on ultracold atoms. Together with another four groups led by Tony Leggett, Gordon Baym, Smitha Vishveshwara and Lumin Duan, we will have about 30 people in 8 research groups from four universities in this meeting. The two main goals of this meeting is, first of all, to know all the local groups interested in cold atoms system and second, to seek possible chance to promote local collaboration and to support our interest on the quantum gas research.

11/4/2005~11/6/2005 : Cold Atom Workshop at Taipei
    In this workshop organized by Prof. Wen-Chin Wu, I am happy to see friends and works from several groups in Taiwan working on cold atom systems. I am also happy to see Allan Griffin, Stefano Giorgini and Ballagh Rob. I presented two talks on the Fermi gas experiment and the molecule experiment. As I see it, research on cold atoms now diversifies and attracts people in condensed matter, nuclear physics, astrophysics... I hope more groups in Taiwan also find this area interesting. I am particularly happy to see and talk to Prof. Gao from NTU, Prof. Han from NCCU, Prof. Hu from NTU, Prof. Bao from NCCU and Prof. Yang from NTU this time. 

10/24/2005~10/26/2005 : Dr  Paul Julienne from NIST visited us
    I invited Paul Julienne to deliver a JFI colloquium talk on 10/25. The title of his talk is "Scattering Resonances and Molecules in Ultracold Atomic Gases". More information is here .  I am very happy to tak to him about our new experiment and ideas. His visit was also very welcomed by our colleagues including Karl Freed, Kathy Levin, Philippe Guyot-Sionnest, Steve Berry, Zheng-Tian Lu and Tom Witten.

9/28/2005 : First Group Meeting
    We had the first group meeting at RI 349. Bob talked about his diode laser design, Chen-Lung about general concept of Zeeman slower, Jeff on the new chamber design. Martin will start next week on imaging system and programing.

9/12/2005 ~9 /20/2005 : BEC/degenerate Fermi gas conference, CPS meeting and Shanghai Jiao Tong university visit
    Thanks to the invitations from Dr. H.W. Xiong and Prof. J.M. Lee, I will present our recent works on cold molecules and Fermi gases in the BEC/Fermi gas conference, the Chinese physics society meeting and Shanghai Jiao Tong university. I  will also meet Jun Ye in Wuhan.
 
8 /30/2005 : Back to Chicago
    My summer visit in Europe was very fruitful and we had important progresses in Innsbruck on the collective behavior of Fermi gases and the Efmov effect. I gave two presentations on a Feshbach model and Efimov physics in the last week. I am very grateful working with Rudi, Christoph, Johannes (also Nancy and Joshua. Congratulations!!), all the hard-working students and Christine. So I wrote...
Subject: Innsbruck, the valley
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:55:18 -0500
From: Cheng Chin <cchin@jfi.uchicago.edu>
To: Arbeitsgruppe Grimm <grimm-l@uibk.ac.at>

Dear Hermits,
In many Chinese martial art novels and plays, there is this cliche that the main actor, originally juvenile and unsuccessful, was one day set up by the evil and thrown over the cliff. Fortunately, he/she survived. After a long aimless struggle in the wild, he/she either encountered  hermits with incredible KungFu skills or found magic potions in secret caves. Whatever that is, he totally concentrated working on it, which eventually turned him/her into a martial art master. Few years later, one day, he/she became strong enough to leave the valley. Then the real story starts....

Very much did I enjoy these fantasies when I was a kid, but little did I know they still happen in the 21st century. 

Because of You, the Chin-ese story can continue.

8/15/2005 ~8 /18/2005 : Paul Julienne from NIST visited us
    Paul is visiting us these days and gave a wonderful talk on the Feshbach molecules at the academic institute. We cooperate on cold collision studies for 7 years, and there are still so many exciting things we can talk about every time we meet. We are now discovering many interesting connections in our approaches to understand the quantum nature of Feshbach molecules.  There are few people like Paul with whom I can enjoy extensive and unlimited discussions on these topics.

8/11/2005 ~8 /13/2005 : Low Temperature Physics Conference (LT24) in Orlando
    My first time going to the LT conference. It was great to learn many recent exciting experiments on He and on superconductors. I had a great time discussing many ideas with Tilman, John Thomas, Yoji Ohashi and also had the chance to discuss with Danial Tsui and Doug Osheroff. On my way back, I came across Rudi at the Washington Dullas airport. Interesting.  

7/24/2005 ~ 8/10/2005 : Visit Tilman Esslinger's group at ETH, Zurich in Switzland
    I  am going to visit Tilman's group. Their recent experiments on Fermi gas in optical lattices are intriguing and I hope I will be able to learn more from Tilman and his coworkers. Selim Jochim is also in Zurich ... it is very nice talking to Michael, Thomas, Ken, Henning, Stephan, Thilo... I also met Chih-Wei Lai from NTU Phys.

7/14/2005 ~ 7/16/2005 : School on Quantum Phase Transitions and Non-Equilibrium Phenomena in Cold Atomic Gases
    I  gave two talks to mostly theorists in this summer school at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. The first one on 7/14 is more pedagogical, the topic is the quantum nature of Feshbach molecules and recent experiments on the cold molecules. The second one, on 7/15, is about collective modes, pairing gap measurements and the mean-field model of a strongly interacting Fermi gas in the BEC-BCS crossover regime. I have many stimulating discussions with Jason Ho, Willie Zwerger, Gora Shlyapnikov, Markus Greiner, Daw-wei Wang... about possible directions in the near future. Trieste is a lovely place...

7/8/2005 : Rudi Grimm, my former advisor, won the "Wittgenstein Prize", a pretigeous academic prize in Austria .
    Rudi is one the two recipients of this major prize this year. I am invited to go the award ceremony in Vienna together with Johannes Hecker Denschlag, Hanns Christoph Naegerl, Florian Schreck, Christine Obmascher and Rudi's family. I am very happy our work on Fermi gas and cold molecules are recognized.

7/4/2005 ~ 7/7/2005 : Telluride workshop on ultracold molecules
    I am going back to US to this ultracold molecule workshop in Telluride. Exactly the same time, Kathy is going from Chicago to Italy . This is pretty crazy, but I really expect in this conference I can learn more and also discuss with other participants about our recent interesting observations on ultracold molecules. They are wild!! I mean the molecules.

6/2005~8/2005: Visit Innsbruck in Austria and ETH in Switzland
    I am returning back to Innsbruck to continue working on both Li and Cs molecule experiments in Rudi Grimm's group. I also invited Jeff and Chen-lung to come work in Innsbruck so they will get to know how the top experiments in cold atoms and molecules are operating. Jeff stayed from 6/4 to 6/24 and Chen-lung 6/19 to 7/19. Apparently, they are having a much better time in Innsbruck than I expected.

5/29~ 6/1/2005 : Aspen Physics workshop: Ultracold Trapped Atomic Gases
    Aspen is beautiful and I had a good time discussing many issues with the experts in the field of quantum gases. I presented our recent calculations on a simple Feshbach model and also the pairing gap experiment. I got to present outdoor and write on the blackboard, which was fun. Unfortunately, I had to leave earlier to catch the flight to Innsbruck .

5/17~5/21/2005: Conference: DAMOP 2005 at Lincohn, Nebraska
    I presented our works in Innsbruck: one invitd talk on the pairing gap measurements in strongly interacting Fermi gases (Friday morning) and one on cesium ultracold molecules and tetramer bound states (Friday afternoon). It was very nice to meet many friends and old colleagues of mine.

5/11/2005 : Experiment Progress: MOT
    This evening we got cold atoms in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). To get MOT, we illuminate thermal atoms with six laser beams together with a  strong magnetic field gradient. The radiation pressure of the lasers slows down the atomic motion to few ten-millionth of a Kelvin above aboslute zero. Bob, Dennis and I went to a Greek restaurant to celebrate!!

4/26/2005 : Experiment Progress: Laser locks
    We got all the lasers locked! These lasers are for cooling and trapping the alkali atoms we want to investigate. Our next step is to get the atoms into a magneto-optical trap.
 
4/17~ 4/21/2005 :  Meeting: Workshop on Strongly Interacting Quantum Gases, Columbus , Ohio
    I gave a talk on the creation of exotic ultracold molecules (G-wave, L-wave and tetramer), and a short presentation on the mean-field model of BEC-BCS crossover. Many issues on interacting Fermi gases and few-body systems were extensively discussed.

4/5/2005: Meeting: Workshop on Quantum Analog Simulation of Quantum Condensed-Matter Model, Arlington, VA
    Many exciting and promising prospects to investigated complex systems based on ultracold atoms in optical lattices were discussed.

4/1/2005 :  Our  " Cs2+Cs2=Cs4" paper is published. Here is the UC press release . This work has been in my dream for many years.

3/29/2005 :  I invited Prof. John Thomas from Duke University to give a JFI colloquium talk on the "High Temperature Superfluidity in Atomic Quantum Gases". He stayed for two days, and we discussed for many hours together with Kathy and Qijin.  My voice was gone after his visit.

3/18/2005 :  John, Bob, Dennis and I are going to move a cesium apparatus from Stanford to Chicago . It will be some intensive work for the weekend!

3/10/2005 :  Prof. Z.-T. Lu invited me to give a colloquium talk at the Argonne National Lab. I also visited many exciting experiments there.

3/3/2005 :   I talked in the Physics colloquium on the pairing gap. I am happy to receive quite a few positive responses.

2/26/2005 :  I gave a talk in the BCAM 2005 conference on "Pairing of fermionic atoms in a strongly interacting quantum gas". Hope more people will be interested in this field.

2/18/2005 :  I gave a Friday talk on my research projects to first year graduate students. I hope students here will be interested in this new and exciting field.

2/4/2005 :   I gave a talk at the PSROC2005 meeting on "Pairing of Fermionic Atoms in a Strongly Interacting Quantum Gas" and met many friends and teachers of mine.

1/17/2005 :   My first day at the U. of Chicago . I have two optical tables and two empty labs at RI. I hope the new labs at IBD will be ready soon.

1/10/2005 :   I am going to move to Chicago from Innsbruck this Friday ( 01/14/2005 ). The weather forecast says it can be -20°C. That sounds pretty bad.