12/16~12/18/2008: Chen-Lung, Xibo, Nate, Kathy-Anne and Cheng attained the DARPA meeting in Las Vegas. Cheng presented the progress on the Cs and LiCs lattice projects.
12/5/2008: Cheng gave a CQSE seminar talk at the National Taiwan University on "Quantum control and quantum information processing based on degenerate quantum gases in optical lattices"
10/23/2008: Invited by Prof. Michael Chapman, Cheng gave a talk on our CsLi research in the New Laser Scientists Conference in Rochester
10/21/2008: Chen-Lung Hung gave a talk on our new evaperation method in the Frontiers in Optics and Laser Sciences meeting in Rochester
10/18/2008: Dr. Kathy-Anne Brickman's is getting married this weekend! 10/16/2008: Group dinner with Arjun, Kara, Cheng, Chen-Lung, Xibo, dennis, Nate, Andi and our special guest, Bob Berry.
10/2008: An interview with Cheng on cold atom research provided by the U. of Chicago Physical Sciences Division INQUIRY newsletter is here (see page 4).
10/2/2008: Prof. Mark Raizen visited our group and gave a talk on his recent works to develop new cooling and trapping schemes on atoms and molecules.
9/30/2008: We achieved lithium-6 MOT and are moving toward combining Li and Cs.
9/22/2008: Invited by Prof. Chih-Wei Lai, Cheng gave a seminar talk at the Michigan State University on our research activities.
9/15/2008: Invited by Prof. Joseph Thywissen, Cheng gave a seminar talk at the Univeristy of Toronto on "Quantum universality and quantum control of ultracold atoms and molecules near Feshbach resonances"
9/3~9/6/2008: Cheng attained the 20th Packard fellow meeting in Park Ciry, Utah and presented a poster on our Cs and CsLi experiments.
8/31/08-9/5/08: Kathy-Anne attended the Gordon Conference on Quantum Information Science and presented a poster on our Li-Cs experiment.
8/29~8/31/2008: Cheng Chin attained Dr. Steve Chu's birthday celebration symposium: "Frontiers in Laser Cooling, Single-Molecule Biophysics and Energy Science" and gave a short talk about experiments on ultracold atoms and molecules.
8/25/2008: Peter Scherpelz joined our group.
8/24/2008: Group BBQ at the Michigan lake. See here.
8/19/2008: Zeeman slower for Li atoms is functional. Li Zeeman slower will be combined with a Cs 2D MOT to load a 3D MOT of both species.
7/31~8/5/2008: First S.M.A.R.T. Woodlawn high school outreach program. Many group members helped, includeing Kathy-Anne, Nate, Arjun, Scott, Kara, William, Dennis and Cheng. Eileen Sheu, Athena Frost, Van Bistrow, Dennis Gordon and several REU students also helped greatly. The outreach ended with a nice BBQ party and is a big success!! Details are here.
7/31/2008: Cheng won the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize on atomic, molecular and optical physics, see medal and certificate.
7/27~8/1/2008: Nate and Cheng attained 2008 ICAP. Cheng gave a talk on the "Universality in few-body systems". Nate prepared a poster on the research projects at the Univ. of Chicago.
7/24/2008: Our paper "Accelarating Evaporative Cooling of Atoms into Bose-Einstein condensation in Optical Traps" is published here. In this paper we demonstrate a very simple scheme to achieve the first runaway evaporative cooling in optical traps. The idea is to tilt the dipole trap in a controled fashion to remove hot atoms. Although atoms are removed only in one direction, we proved that the evaporation is effectively 3D and is much more efficient than the conventional trap-weakening method. This scheme can be applied to any atomic species with non-zero magnetic moment (UIUC and NIST have confirmed this point using Rb.) If you cannot access the paper from the above link or have any question about this scheme, please feel free to contact us.
7/22/2008: Cheng discussed the cold atom research at the U. of Chicago with the REU students supported by Chicago MRSEC.
7/6~7/10/2008: Cheng gave two invited talks at the Summer School on Cold Atom Physics and Precision Measurements and one in the third International Symposium on Cold Atom Physics in Wuhan, China
6/2~6/7/2008: Cheng visited NIST and worked on a few collaborative projects with R. Grimm, F. Ferlaino, P. Julienne and E. Tiesinga.
6/1~6/2/2008: Annual DARPA grant review meeting.
5/27~5/31/2008: DAMOP meeting at Penn State University. We presented three talks on few-body physics and quantum manipulations in optical lattices and Feshbach molecular state calcatuion (together with P. Julienne and E. Tiesinga) and two posters.
5/12/2008: Installation of dye laser system
5/7/2008: First meeting on the SMART outreach program with Mr. David Epstein
5/1/2008: Prof. William Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel prize in Physics on laser cooling and trapping, visited our group and gave a colloquium talk as well as two discussion sessions with the undergraduate and graduate students.
4/7/2008: Joint group meeting with Dr. Zheng-Tian Lu's group from Argonne National Laboratory. Zheng-Tian's student 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
1/1/2008: Cheng Chin is awarded the NSF CAREER grant on "Few-body universality study using ultracold atoms in optical lattices".