February 2023: Kevin Presenting at ITAMP/B2 Winter Graduate School

Graduate student Kevin Mack-Fisher presented his work on the “Tunneling dynamics of small two-component Fermi systems” at the ITAMP/B2 Winter Graduate School “Cold Molecules for Quantum Information Technologies and Fundamental Physics.” Thank you to the fantastic lecturers John John, Simon Cornish, David DeMille, Kang-Kuen Ni, Gerhard Rempe, Timur Tscherbul, and Nicholas Hutzler.

February 2023: Jugal Presenting in Israel

Graduate student Jugal Talukdar presented his most recent work on effective spin Hamiltonian and droplet-like states at the Minerva-Gentner Symposium on “Coherent manipulation of few-body complexes” at the David Lopatie Conference Centre Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehevot, Israel. Many thanks to the organizers (Roee Ozeri, Lev Khaykovich, Reinhard Doerner, Maksim Kunitski, and Tobias Schaetz) for generously supporting student travel. Thank you for the fantastic talks, posters, and physics discussions—and thank you for the trips to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv!

02/06/23: Women in Physics (WiP) Hosted Prof. Maren Mossman

The Women in Physics group of the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics Astronomy hosted Prof. Maren Mossman from the University of San Diego. Maren presented during the Professional Development Series Luncheon on “A path to community building in higher-education physics departments”. It was a great pleasure to host Maren and to discuss community building, departmental efforts, DEI, and physics.

1/16/23: Beyond the SMA work up on arXiv

Work led by Jianwen Jie on the theory side and Shan Zhong on the experimental side is out on the arXiv. The manuscript is entitled “Dynamical mean-field driven spinor condensate physics beyond the single-mode approximation.” Congratulations to theorists and experimentalists alike. It’s really nice to see the agreement between the experimental data from Arne Schwettmann’s lab and the Gross-Pitaevskii theory.

1/6/23: Spinor BEC work out on arXiv

Zach Hardest-Shaw, graduate student in the OSU group led by Yingmei Liu, uploaded our sodium spinor BEC manuscript to the arXiv. The manuscript is entitled “Manipulation of nonequilibrium spin dynamics of an ultracold gas in a moving optical lattice.” Take a look at the beautiful experimental data, taken by Zach and Jared Austin (great job Zach and Jared!). The dynamic single-mode approximation theory, developed by Qingze Guan and Robert Lewis-Swan very convincingly describes the experimental data. Congratulations to all!

September 2022

Welcome to postdoc Balakrishnan Viswanathan! We are looking forward to working together.

New paper out in Physical Review A

Check out Jugal’s new article at: Physical Review A 106, 013722 (2022).

07/29/2022: New funding from the W. M. Keck Foundation

We are grateful to the W. M. Keck Foundation for generously supporting a new project with collaborators Professors Grant Biedermann and Alberto Marino from OU on the transition from classical to quantum synchronization. It’s an exciting project!!! The VPRP Office ran a nice news story on this. Check it out here.

07/21/2022: New paper out on arXiv!

Congratulations to Jugal! Jugal’s newest manuscript, which has just been accepted for publication in Physical Review A, is up on the arXiv: see arXiv:2207.10207. The paper is entitled “Undamped Rabi oscillations due to polaron-emitter hybrid states in non-linear photonic wave guide coupled to emitters.” Great job Jugal!

July 1, 2022: Opening for postdoctoral researcher

Please pass the opening for a postdoctoral position in the Blume group on to interested candidates. The advertisement can be found here.

Paper out in Physical Review A

Check out Jugal’s new article at: Physical Review A 105, 063501 (2022).

05/05/2022: Jugal’s paper accepted by Physical Review A

Jugal’s paper entitled “Two emitters coupled to a bath with Kerr-like nonlinearity: Exponential decay, fractional populations, and Rabi oscillations,” co-authored with Doerte, has been accepted for publication in Physical Review A. Congratulations Jugal!!! The schematic above illustrates the system Hamiltonian and Hilbert space structure.

05/05/2022: Departmental Award Ceremony

Congratulations to Kevin for receiving the department Neil E. Shafer-Ray Physics Award!!! The good news were announced at the departmental end-of-the-semester spring fling. In addition, group members Aidan, Dave, Jugal, and Kevin received Certificates of Appreciation for their work on the departmental Undergraduate Studies Committee (Aidan), on the departmental Graduate Studies Committee (Dave), on the departmental Graduate Recruiting and Selection Committee (Kevin), and as G-PSI President (Jugal). Way to go! Aidan was also recognized for being one of the top Physics Sophomores.

04/30/2022: Aidan featured in OU’s “Young Artist Honors Concert”

Blume group member Aidan Sudler does not just have interests in physics… Aidan is also a highly accomplished pianist. Congratulations to Aidan for being selected to perform in OU’s Young Artist Honors Concert on Saturday, April 30, 3:00pm, in Catlett Music Center, Pitman Recital Hall. Presented by the School of Music, the Young Artist Honors Concert features the winners of the Young Artist Solo Competition. Eight freshman and sophomore students will perform solo works during the concert. This year’s winners are Kevin Barton, Xavier Williams, Xander McRae, Meagan Ballard, Elayna Davidson, Jace Harris, Ethan Roberts, and Aidan Sudler. You can listen to a recording at this link (it starts at minute 31) — very nice performance!!!

04/22/2022: Poster Session hosted by G-PSI

Many thanks to G-PSI—led by Jugal Talukdar, Jordan Van Ness, Hunter Campbell, and Robert Wiley Deal—for putting on a departmental graduate student poster session. It was a great success! Graduate students Dave (middle photo), Jugal (right photo), and Kevin (left photo) presented. Here they are in action.

04/09/2022: Aidan presenting at Undergraduate Research Day

Aidan presented his work on “Self-sustained quantum oscillators” at OU’s Undergraduate Research Day. Aidan did an awesome job! Aren’t the phase space images cool?

AJ’s paper published in Physical Review A

Congratulations to AJ! AJ’s first-author paper got published in Physical Review A. Check it out here: The title is “Structural properties of ⁴He_N (N=2-10) clusters for different potential models at the physical point and at unitarity”. The citation is A.J. Yates and D. Blume, Physical Review A 105, 022824 (2022). This paper is a great summary of all the work that AJ did as an undergraduate student in the Blume group. Way to go, AJ!!!

Feb. 7-18, 2022: Doerte presents invited talk at Workshop

Doerte presented the work led by graduate student Jugal Talukdar during the online workshop “Fermi Polarons: from Ultracold gases to 2D semiconductors — FermiPolar Workshop -7-18 Feb 2022”. This truly inspiring workshop was co-organized by Jonathan Keeling, Jesper Levinsen, Francesca Maria Marchetti, and Meera Parish. Thanks for putting together such a beautiful program! The workshop website can be found here.

Sudden cold in January 2022: What’s the thermodynamics behind this?

12/10/2021: Congratulations to Kevin Mack-Fisher for passing his General Exam

Kevin gave a very nice talk today and passed the written and oral parts of his General Exam. Congratulations, Kevin—great job! Many thanks go to the Committee: Profs. Eric Abraham, Grant Biedermann, Kieran Mullen, and Ying Wang for their time, questions, comments, and suggestions!

12/03/2021: Congratulations to Dave Hill for passing his General Exam

Dave gave a very nice talk today and passed the written and oral parts of his General Exam. Congratulations, Dave—great job! Many thanks go to the Committee: Profs. Howie Baer, Robert Lewis-Swan, Arne Schwettmann, and Binbin Weng for their time, questions, comments, and suggestions!

11/29/2021: Dave Hill Awarded Avenir Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship

Congratulations to graduate student Dave Hill for being awarded an Avenir Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship for Summer 2022! Keep up the great work—we are looking forward to seeing cool results on cavity-emitter systems.

Prospective Graduate Student Open House: Thursday, Dec. 9 (1-3pm Central)

If you are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics, we invite you to join the department’s “Prospective Graduate Student Open House”!!! Send an email to PA-Grad at ou.edu to obtain the Zoom link info — we are looking forward to welcoming you at the virtual open house!!!

11/15/2021: Aidan selected as a recipient of the Rita H. Lottinville Prize

Aidan has been chosen as a recipient of a Rita H. Lottinville Prize honoring the 2020-2021 freshman class! Congratulations, Aidan!!! Each year, five outstanding University of Oklahoma sophomores are selected for the prestigious Rita H. Lottinville Prize. The prize, which includes a $1,500 scholarship, is administered by the OU Foundation. The prize was established in 1952 and endowed in 1982 by the late Savoie Lottinville in honor of his wife. A 30-year trustee of the OU Foundation, Lottinville was director emeritus of the OU Press and Regents’ Professor Emeritus of History. 

10/5: Undergraduate Aidan Sudler presents poster at departmental picnic hosted by SPS

Aidan was one of the many undergraduate students presenting their research at the departmental picnic. Congratulations to all undergraduates who presented their work — truly impressive! And many thanks to the SPS for sponsoring this event!

October 4-8, 2021: Doerte is giving four lectures at virtual School

Doerte Blume, Alejandro Kievsky, and Pascal Naidon are lecturing at the School on Critical Stability of Few-Body Quantum Systems. Doerte’s lectures are entitled:

• Lecture 1: 1D fermions: statics and dynamics
• Lecture 2: Dynamics of the helium dimer dynamics: universal and non-universal features
• Lecture 3: Efimov scenario in the presence of spin-orbit coupling
• Lecture 4: Dynamics of two-level emitter(s) coupled to bath

Check out the program and lectures at this link.

Sept. 16, 2021: Thank you, thank you, and another thank you to the Dodge Family!!!

September 16, 2021 is a memorable day for the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy — we are extremely grateful to the Dodge family for their generous gift. OU’s announcement states: “The Dodge family chose to reserve half of the historic gift for OU’s Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, within the College of Arts and Sciences, of which Homer Dodge was a former professor and chair. The physics department was renamed the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2005. Of the funds earmarked for the Physics and Astronomy Department, the majority will benefit the Dodge Family Postdoctoral Research Fellows Fund, followed by the Research Faculty Fund, the Strategic Research Investment Fund, and the Dean’s Student Recruitment and Bridge Fund. The remainder of the Physics and Astronomy Department allocation will go to the Distinguished Visitor and Workshop Fund and the Dean’s Graduate and Postdoctoral Retention Fund.” What a monumental and transformational moment for the department!

September 2021: Bisons in the Wichita Mountains

Congratulations to Kevin Mack-Fisher

Kevin passed his last qualifier. Congratulations, Kevin! With class work and qualifiers out of the way, we are looking forward to many interesting research discussions.

08/16/2021: Undergraduate Aidan Sudler selected to receive fellowship for Fall 2021

Aidan Sudler, who joined the Blume group through the FYRE program in Spring 2021 and continued working on the classical and quantum dynamics of a damped-driven harmonic oscillator remotely during the summer 2021, has been awarded a $1,000 fellowship for Fall 2021 through the Honors Research Assistant Program (HRAP). Congratulations, Aidan—keep up the excellent work!

07/30/2021: Bittersweet farewell

Today was AJ and Claire’s last day. We are sad to see these two talented, creative, and kind students leave the group. Yet, we are immensely happy for AJ to take the next big step (graduate school) and for Claire to get ready for her fall semester in France! The chocolate cake on the terrace of Lin Hall was delicious, even in the Oklahoma summer heat…

Dr. Yangqian Yan to join Chinese University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor

Former graduate student Yangqian Yan will be joining the Department of Physics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in August 2021 as an Assistant Professor — congratulations, Yan! You can learn more about Yan’s most recent scientific accomplishments here. We are looking forward to continuing to interact with Yan and wish him well in establishing his own group.

Jugal takes home “Best Oral Presentation Award”

The certificate reads: “This certificate of best oral presentation award is awarded to Jugal Talukdar of Center for Quantum Research and Technology, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA for the oral paper entitled “Separation-dependent emission pathways of quantum emitters” and is presented in the National Conference on Emerging Trends in Physics (NCETP 2021) held on 16th of June 2021.” Congratulations, Jugal — well done!

Former grad student Dr. Debraj Rakshit joined HBU faculty

Debraj Rakshit, who earned his Ph.D. in 2012 for work on few-fermion systems, joined the faculty at the Institute of Science, HBU, Varanasi. Congratulations, Debraj! Debraj’s recent work covers topics ranging from quantum information science to quantum computing to many-body physics, including exciting new developments in the areas of Pauli crystals, quantum droplets, and twistronics.

Claire I. Kvande joins group for summer ’21

Welcome to Claire Kvande, who is working with the Blume group during the summer 2021 as part of the REU program of the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy. Claire is visiting from Kalamazoo College, which is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and working on understanding the time dynamics of finite-sized cavity rings. Welcome, Claire—we are excited to have you in the group!

A.J. and Jugal presenting at virtual DAMOP 2021 Meeting

05/06/2021 (departmental awards announced): Congrats to A.J. and Kevin!

Congratulations, Kevin, for being awarded a Kenneth and Joyce Harwell Scholarship — this is fantastic! Congratulations, AJ, for being awarded the outstanding graduating senior Fowler prize — this is fantastic!

A.J. Yates will be attending graduate school at Rice University in fall

Congratulations to A.J. for accepting Rice University’s offer to join their physics graduate program. Great job, A.J.! We are looking forward to working together during the summer 2021.

February 2021: Doerte named Outstanding Referee

The highly selective Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes about 150 of the roughly 71,000 currently active referees. At the start of the program, in 2008 and 2009, larger groups were selected by our Editors for the Outstanding Referee designation, in order to “catch up” and recognize referees who had already served for many years. Like Fellowship in the APS, this is a lifetime award. In this year, 2021, 151 Outstanding Referees were selected — Doerte was among them. Check out the APS announcement. Thanks to Physical Review and their staff for their excellent work, ensuring and promoting quality peer-review.

Congratulations to graduate student Dave Hill

Dave passed his last two qualifiers. Congratulations, Dave! With class work almost done, we are looking forward to great research contributions.

January 2021: Wishing postdoc Jianwen Jie all the best for the future!

All the best to postdoctoral researcher Dr. Jianwen Jie and his family.

Jianwen is returning to China after three years at the University of Oklahoma.

Safe travels!

And all the best for your and your family’s future adventures!

Hiking the Ouachita National Recreation Trail: Oklahoma/Arkansas Border

January 2021: Welcome to undergraduate Aidan Sudler

Welcome to Aidan Sudler! Aidan, a Freshman at OU, has joined the group to get involved in research. Aidan is part of OU’s FYRE program and will be exploring the classical dynamics of non-trivial harmonic oscillators, such as the van der Pol oscillator. The goal will be, down the road, to explore connections to quantum statistical mechanics descriptions.

Some press on Nature Physics article

The article entitled “Ultrafast manipulation of the weakly bound helium dimer” by Kunitski, Guan, et al., which appeared in Nature Physics on December 21, 2020, and is accompanied by a “News & Views” highlight entitled “Gently stirred not shaken” by Daniel Rolles, received quite a bit of press. See, for example “Quantum wave in helium dimer filmed for the first time: Collaboration between Goethe University and the University of Oklahoma” for a nice highlight by nanotech-now. Nature Physics had listed 14 news stories from 11 outlets on January 8, 2021.

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!

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