Use laser cooling to trap a gas of a billion Rb atoms and cool to 100 m K.

1. Laser cooling & trapping, ultracold gases, Bose-Einstein condensation • Use laser cooling to trap a gas of a billion Rbatoms • and cool to 100 mK. • Magnetic fields + rfradiation evaporatively cool • sample to ~20 nK. • As atoms become colder & denser, their de Broglie wavelengths increase and start to overlap. • Atoms condense into ground state of trap  BEC! T ~ 100 mK T = 3.1 mK T = 800 nK T = 120 nK T = 24 nK ~2 peV

2. McGuirk group cast Jeff McGuirk Yang Lan (M.Sc. Student) DornaNiroomand (M.Sc. student) • Current group interests: • Quantum fluid dynamics: How does quantum symmetry affect spin dynamics in ultra-cold gases? • Out-of-equilibrium spin behavior in a quantum gas above and below quantum degeneracy (spin waves, coherence dynamics, instabilities) • Tunable optical potentials: Can we create new novel states of matter through optical manipulation of ultra-cold gases? •  Optically-induced “electromagnetic gravity” (creating ultracold Bose stars in the lab), sonic black holes in condensates