Welcome to the Optical Lattices team web page!

In our experiments, we realize iconic quantum mechanical systems using ultra-cold rubidium atoms.  These atoms are first cooled to nearly absolute zero, only a few nano-Kelvin (room temperature is about 300 K, so our system is about 10 billion times colder than a pleasant spring day); the atoms are then confined to the sites of a lattice formed from standing waves of light.  The images above are of our two rubidium experiments.

Rubidium 1 is our first rubidium experiment and has been used for a range of lattice experiments.  These experiments include “single-quanta” or “mean-field” experiments such as: the pattered loading of atoms into every-third lattice site in an optical lattice; the decay of vibrational motion in a 1D optical lattice; and the long-time evolution of atoms in an optical lattice.  Other experiments have involved properties of the many-body system such as: correlations in a 1D Bose gas; damping in 1D lattice systems; and the Mott-Insulator to Superfluid transition in 2D.  More recently we developed a new lattice called the “double well lattice” in which we have: studied the coherent dynamics of few-atom systems; addressed atoms in “every left” or “every right” lattice; and even implemented a 2-qubit gate.

Rubidium 2 is a newly constructed apparatus which is designed to study rubidium atoms with the addition of a Feshbach resonance to tune the interparticle interaction strength.

The rubidium 1 and 2 teams, overseen by PI’s Trey Porto and Ian Spielman, are part of the larger Laser Cooling and Trapping group at NIST.  Both PI’s are part of the JQI (joint quantum institute), a new research partnership between the University of Maryland, NIST and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences.