Nature Physics article on the helium dimer by Kunitski, Guan, et al. is out

It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Maksim Kunitski, Reinhard Doerner and others from Frankfurt University on the helium dimer. The helium dimer is one of the most weakly-bound “naturally” occurring molecules. Since it’s so weakly bound, the preparation and manipulation of this fascinating molecule are rather tricky. Unless you isolate the dimer and are extremely careful, it tends to fall apart… Maksim and coworkers set up a molecular beam experiment and used femto-second lasers to probe the system. The theory calculations by OU postdoc Qingze Guan do not only match the experimental data, without a single adjustable parameter, but additionally provide unique insights. Check out the article entitled “Ultrafast manipulation of the weakly bound helium dimer”, which just appeared in Nature Physics, and the accompanying “News & Views” highlight entitled “Gently stirred not shaken” by Daniel Rolles.

Dec. 16, 2020: Doerte Gave Invited Talk (Virtually) in Bad Honnef

Doerte gave an invited talk at the 735. WE-Heraeus-Seminar entitled “Exploring Quantum Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Atoms and Molecules.” Due to Covid-19, the entire conference was virtual by Zoom. Many thanks to Axel Pelster, TU Kaiserslautern, and Carlos Sa de Melo, Georgia Tech, for organizing this event!

Poster at Virtual Winter School by Jugal

Jugal is presenting a poster entitled “Separation-dependent emission pathways of quantum emitters” during the Virtual Winter School on Strongly Correlated Quantum Matter, 11/30-12/18, 2020. The school is run by the MPI-PKS in Dresden, in collaboration with the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Dec. 2020: Jugal Awarded Travel Grant

Graduate student Jugal Talukdar was awarded a Robberson Travel Grant by the Graduate School. The award will cover the registration for the 2021 March meeting. Congratulations! We are looking forward to the meeting and Jugal’s presentation.

Dec. 10, 2020: New Study Finds OU Research Well Cited, Impactful

According to a recent study, D. Blume is one of 188 University of Oklahoma researchers listed among the most influential researchers in the world. Read more about the announcement here.

Tunneling Paper Published in PRL — Congratulations to All!

The tunneling paper by Qingze Guan et al., a collaboration with Peter Engels’ group at WSU, has appeared in PRL. Check it out here.

Call for Nominations for 2021 Faddeev Medal

We are pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2021 “Faddeev Medal” 
Prize. We are seeking nominations of scientists who have advanced the field of 
few-body physics significantly, either through ground-breaking research or due to 
crucial progress achieved over the course of their career.

The Faddeev medal was inaugurated in 2016 by the Topical Group on Few-Body Systems & Multiparticle Dynamics (GFB) of the American Physical Society and the European Research Committee on Few-Body Problems in Physics (ERCFBP) to recognize distinguished achievements in few-body physics. It is named in honor of distinguished scientist Ludwig D. Faddeev (1934-2017). It was awarded for the first time in 2018 to Vitaly Efimov and Rudi Grimm for “the theoretical discovery of a series of weakly-bound three-body quantum states known as Efimov states” and “in recognition of his ground-breaking experiments confirming the Efimov effect”, respectively.

The nomination deadline for the 2021 “Faddeev Medal” is April 15, 2021. See this link for more details.

Applications/Registrations Accepted Now for KITP Program & Conference in May/June ’22

We are very happy to announce that applications are now accepted for the KITP program entitled “Living near Unitarity“. The organizers are Olivier Dulieu, Chris Greene, Alejandro Kievsky, and Daniel Phillips. The program will take place in Santa Barbara, May 9-June 17, 2022. The application deadline is February 1, 2021!!! The program will be accompanied by the conference “Opportunities and Challenges in Few-Body Physics: Unitarity and Beyond“, coordinated by Doerte Blume, Olivier Dulieu, Chris Greene, and Alejandro Kievsky. The dates are May 23 – May 26, 2022. Let’s hope that Covid-19 will be under control by then — we are looking forward to welcoming as many friends as possible from all over the world! Let’s keep our fingers crossed. And in the meantime, please be responsible and wear a mask!

Announcing Open House for Prospective Graduate Students: 11/17/20 and 12/3/20

Fall 2020: Welcome to Kevin D. Mack-Fisher

We are welcoming second-year student Kevin Mack-Fisher to the group. Maybe Kevin can find clever ways to apply the techniques he is studying in his Machine Learning class to few-body algorithms applicable to atomic systems.

September 7-11, 2020: Virtual Workshop Hosted by the MPI-PKS in Dresden

Doerte is co-organizing the virtual workshop “Mesoscopic cold atom systems in and out of equilibrium” in collaboration with Profs. Thomas Busch (OIST Graduate School) and Artur Widera (University of Kaiserslautern). While we would have really liked to travel to Dresden to exchange ideas and gather with old and new physics friends, the online format is proofing to be a good alternative. It doesn’t replace personal interactions—however, given the current Covid-19 situation, the virtual workshop is the way to go. Check out the workshop website.

August 31, 2020: Dave Hill Passes Two Qualifiers

Congratulations to graduate student Dave Hill for passing the Quantum Mechanics and Classical and Statistical Mechanics qualifiers. The qualifiers took place the week before classes stated and Dave learned about the good news on Friday! Way to go.

Welcoming Carlie Zhimo Jie to the World!

Congratulation to postdoc Dr. Jianwen Jie and his family to the birth of daughter Carlie Zhimo Jie. Carlie was born on Wednesday, August 12, 2020. Below you can see Carlie, about 10 days young, framed in equations and geometry. Time will tell if Carlie has a love for the sciences, arts, or literature, or maybe all of the above…

August 10, 2020: Congratulations to postdoc Jianwen and co-authors!

The paper entitled “Mean-field spin-oscillation dynamics beyond the single-mode approximation for a harmonically trapped spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate” by Jianwen Jie, Q. Guan, S. Zhong, A. Schwettmann, and D. Blume (see arXiv:2008.05118) has been accepted for publication in Physical Review A. We are looking forward to seeing our theory predictions for a new dynamically driven mean-field resonance in print! Amendment from 08/31/2020: The journal reference is Phys. Rev. A 102, 023324 (2020).

July 22, 2020: “Non-exponential tunneling” work posted on arXiv

Tunneling through a barrier is intriguing: Classically, a particle does not have enough energy to escape. Quantum mechanically, however, there is a chance for the particle to escape. Typically, the quantum mechanical tunneling probability is described by an exponential. It turns out, though, that the quantum mechanical tunneling process is much more intricate. For example, even for a single particle escaping out of a potential well, oscillatory short-time dynamics exists on top of the overall exponential decay. Our most recent preprint, which can be found on the arXiv at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.10925.pdf, explores tunneling in the presence of mean-field interactions. The mean-field interactions lead to swallowtails in the band structure and non-exponential tunneling dynamics. This non-exponential tunneling dynamics is observed experimentally (data taken in the Engels lab at WSU) and, through extensive theory calculations by postdoc Qingze Guan, traced back to the existence of swallowtails. The agreement between theory and experiment is quite stunning — congratulations to Qingze, Ome, Thomas, and Sean for these nice result!

June 15, 2020: Collaborative Work with Engels’ Group Highlighted by PRA

Our joint work with Peter Engels’ experimental group at WSU has been highlighted as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review A. The paper is entitled “Rabi oscillations and Ramsey-type pulses in ultracold bosons: Role of interactions”. Check it out and see for yourself how well Qingze’s theory data fit Thomas’ and Sean’s experimental data. The figure on the right provides a first taste: the solid line shows Gross-Pitaevskii equation results; for comparison, the green and red symbols show experimental data. Outstanding job — congratulations to all!

Summer 2020: Welcome to Dave Hill

Dave Hill, who is about to finish his first year as a graduate student at OU, joined the Blume group. To get started, Dave is looking into understanding emitters embedded into a photonics background. Welcome, Dave!

DAMOP2020 — virtual, June 1 – 5

Check out the group’s contributions at the 2020 meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society. Take a look at the scientific program at https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DAMOP20

Postdoc Dr. Jianwen Jie will be presenting a poster (K01.00103) and is also a co-author on two contributions from the Schwettmann group at OU (K01.00105, N09.00003). Nice job Jianwen!

Former postdoc Dr. Qingze Guan has several contributions on projects that he worked on while at the University of Oklahoma in collaboration with Jianwen, the Schwettmann group, and the Engels group at WSU (D09.0006, E01.00099, K01.00103, K01.00105, N09.0003). Great job Qingze!

Spring 2020 in Norman, OK

Undergraduate AJ Yates presenting at URD2020

The OU Undergraduate Research Day going online for the first time in 2020; it takes place on April 25 — and the videos will remain up beyond this date. Take a look at all the great videos and search for AJ Yates’ video contribution on small helium clusters on the Honors College’s website: https://honors.oucreate.com/undergradresearch/

Congratulations, AJ, for putting together a nice contribution!!!

OU hosts CUWiP2020

The Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy is hosting APS CUWiP at OU 2020. Check out details at http://www.ou.edu/cuwip. Thank you to all for making this event a big success!

The event was spearheaded by CUWiP Chair Amber Roepe, a OU physics graduate student in experimental high energy physics. Doerte served as the Faculty Chair. The event was made possible by the dedicated efforts of a large number of undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and faculty from Physics and Astronomy, as well as the financial support of many entities across campus — many thanks to everybody who helped out. This wouldn’t have been possible without the many, many hours that the many volunteers put in or without the financial support provided by OU, the APS, and private individuals. And many thank to the enthusiastic student participants and presenters!!!

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