News

Sun January 11, 2015

CUA Retreat

The first (ever!) CUA Retreat was a great success, with many scientific talks and poster presentations
News type:
Thu January 1, 2015

Kang-Kuen Ni awarded 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics

The 19th ICOLS conference takes place June 8-12 in Hokkaido, Japan, with CUA representation. Vladan Vuletic will report on a joint MIT-Harvard CUA experiment with Mikhail Lukin on switching of light with light using pulses containing only a few hundred photons. For a readable explanation of how to make light interact with light see the...
News type:
Wed December 3, 2014

High-power frequency-converted fiber lasers for scientific applications

Investment in high-power fiber laser technology for industrial processing and military applications has enabled commercial lasers with hundreds of Watts of diffraction-limited output to come to market. These lasers are ideal pump sources for high-power (10s to 100s of Watts), widely tunable optical parametric oscillators which may be tuned from the visible to the mid-infrared...
News type:
Wed September 24, 2014

Study: Online classes really do work (Pritchard)

Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics, was awarded a prize for graduate education for his courses 8.421 (Atomic and Optical Physics) and 8.422 (Atomic and Optical Physics II).
News type:
Mon September 1, 2014

Yichao Yu wins 2014 Joel Matthew Orloff Award for Research

The Joel Matthew Orloff Awards were established by Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Orloff in memory of their son Joel, a physics major, who died in an automobile accident shortly after graduation from MIT in 1978. One thousand dollars is awarded to each of several physics majors in the following three categories:
News type:
Mon September 1, 2014

Colin Kennedy wins MIT Martin Deutsch Award

Colin Kennedy was awarded the MIT Martin Deutsch Award for the realization of synthetic gauge fields for neutral atoms.  This prize is awarded to an MIT graduate student in the mid-course of research for study in any area of physics, with preference given to experimental physics. The award was created in honor of Professor Martin...
News type:
Wed January 1, 2014

Buffer-gas loaded magneto-optical traps for Yb, Tm, Er, and Ho

Novel physics in areas like quantum information, cold controlled chemistry and precision measurements is predicted to be accessible with molecules at temperatures in the mK regime. These approaches require molecular beam sources which are unavailable at present. In particular, providing cold, slow and bright beams of a general set of molecules, ideally independent of their...
News type:
Wed January 1, 2014

Quantum Interference Between Independent Reservoirs in Open Quantum Systems

When a quantum system interacts with multiple reservoirs, the environmental effects are usually treated in an additive manner. We showed that that assumption breaks down for non-Markovian environments that have finite memory times. Specifically, we demonstrated that quantum interferences between independent environments could qualitatively modify the dynamics of the physical system. We illustrated that effect...
News type: