Optical trapping has transformed our ability to manipulate and control atoms and micro/nanoparticles, offering numerous applications and research directions across a wide range of scientific fields. From biological cells and colloidal microparticles to nanoparticles and cold atoms, the manipulation of single particles using optical tweezers has provided us with invaluable insights. One...
Ultracold gases of paramagnetic atoms or dipolar molecules are fascinating in the quantum degenerate regime, to be sure. However, even a thermal gas consisting of these entities may have unusual features. Specifically, polar molecules with sufficiently large dipole moment can enter the hydrodynamic regime, where the mean-free path for collisions is far smaller than the scale of structures in...
Cavity quantum electrodynamics studies the strong interaction between matter and the electromagnetic field of an optical cavity: the enhanced interaction is useful both for reading the properties of the atoms with a fast, sensitive and weakly destructive measurement and for quantum simulation where atoms interact by exchanging photons with each other at a distance. One of the drawbacks of...
Dissipative quantum many-body problems, such as those arising in collective light-matter interactions, present theoretical challenges. To explore these phenomena experimentally, we have developed an experimental setup that studies collective light scattering from an ordered ensemble of atoms. Recently, we achieved the first trapping and imaging of single dysprosium atoms in optical tweezers...
