Malcolm Boshier

Shortcuts to adiabaticity in a time-dependent box

A method is proposed to drive an ultrafast non-adiabatic dynamics of an ultracold gas trapped in a time-dependent box potential. The resulting state is free from spurious excitations associated with the breakdown of adiabaticity, and preserves the quantum correlations of the initial state up to a scaling factor. The process relies on the existence of an adiabatic invariant and the inversion of the dynamical self-similar scaling law dictated by it. Its physical implementation generally requires the use of an auxiliary expulsive potential. The method is extended to a broad family of interacting many-body systems. As illustrative examples we consider the ultrafast expansion of a Tonks-Girardeau gas and of Bose-Einstein condensates in different dimensions, where the method exhibits an excellent robustness against different regimes of interactions and the features of an experimentally realizable box potential.

Creation of matter wave Bessel beams and observation of quantized circulation in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Bessel beams are plane waves with amplitude profiles described by Bessel functions. They are important because they propagate ‘diffraction-free’ and because they can carry orbital angular momentum. Here we report the creation of a Bessel beam of de Broglie matter waves. The Bessel beam is produced by the free evolution of a thin toroidal atomic Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) which has been set into rotational motion. By attempting to stir it at different rotation rates, we show that the toroidal BEC can only be made to rotate at discrete, equally spaced frequencies, demonstrating that circulation is quantized in atomic BECs. The method used here can be viewed as a form of wavefunction engineering which might be developed to implement cold atom matter wave holography.

A High-Sensitivity Tunable Two-Beam Fiber-Coupled High-Density Magnetometer with Laser Heating

Atomic magnetometers (AM) are finding many applications in biomagnetism, national security, industry, and science. Fiber-coupled (FC) designs promise to make them compact and flexible for operation. Most FC designs are based on a single-beam configuration or electrical heating. Here, we demonstrate a two-beam FC AM with laser heating that has 5 fT/Hz1/2 sensitivity at low frequency (50 Hz), which is higher than that of other fiber-coupled magnetometers and can be improved to the sub-femtotesla level. This magnetometer is widely tunable from DC to very high frequencies (as high as 100 MHz; the only issue might be the application of a suitable uniform and stable bias field) with a sensitivity under 10 fT/Hz1/2 and can be used for magneto-encephalography (MEG), magneto-cardiography (MCG), underground communication, ultra-low MRI/NMR, NQR detection, and other applications.

Quantum Sensing for High Energy Physics

Report of the first workshop to identify approaches and techniques in the domain of quantum sensing that can be utilized by future High Energy Physics applications to further the scientific goals of High Energy Physics.

Quantum Simulations in Ion Traps

We are using an array of laser-controlled strontium ions confined in a linear rf trap to build a multi-body quantum simulator to solve otherwise intractable many-body quantum problems.