Atomic, Molecular and Optical

Primary Current Research Efforts of Rice AMO Faculty

See also the Condensed Matter page for related research

Barry Dunning

Engineering atomic wavefunctions with short-duration pulsed electric fields

Non-linear dynamics and classical and quantum chaos

Behavior of atoms in the presence of a nearby surface

Ultra-low-energy electron-molecule scattering

Randall Hulet

Behavior of quantum degenerate systems including Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluid states of paired atomic Fermi gases

Use of cold-atom model systems to explore non-Fermi liquid behavior in strongly correlated fermions

Quantum magnetism

Ultra-cold collisions

Adilet Imambekov

Theory of 1D quantum liquids

Many-body dynamics of strongly correlated liquids

Strongly correlated phenomena with ultracold atomic gases

Tom Killian

Ultra-cold collisions

Strongly-coupled ultra-cold neutral plasmas

Han Pu

Behavior of quantum degenerate systems including Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluid states of paired atomic Fermi gases

Use of cold-atom model systems to explore non-Fermi liquid behavior in strongly correlated fermions

Quantum magnetism

Quantum information

Atom Optics

Links above have complete descriptions of ongoing research programs

Examples of AMO research at Rice:

A false-color rendering of a two-dimensional image of a phase separated cloud of lithium-6 atoms. The tall, semi-transparent central region consists of fully paired atoms, one spin-up atom for every spin-down. This core region is believed to be a superfluid. The opaque peaks on either side, as well as the faint ring around the bottom, are the excess unpaired spin-up atoms that have been expelled from the central core. The light in the background is a representation of the probe laser beam used to capture this image.		The blue fluorescence is light scattered from one billion   strontium atoms that are trapped with lasers and cooled to 1 millikelvin. Laser-cooled strontium is used to produce ultracold neutral plasmas and to study fundamental atom-photon and atom-atom interactions.