News
Congratulations Liyu!
Congratulations to Liyu on the successful defense!
11/19/2024
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Hamburg!
The group will be moving to the Universität Hamburg in spring 2025. We have PhD openings in Hamburg on the triangular-lattice quantum gas microscope experiment and a new cryogenic optical tweezer experiment.
https://www.uni-hamburg.de/stellenangebote/ausschreibung.html?jobID=c5c9293f70895fd19d2f1a1a763d0c0853f35667
09/01/2024
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PostDoc position in Hamburg
08/31/2024
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Congratulations Jirayu!
Congratulations to Jirayu on the successful defense!
04/04/2024
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Department Poster awards
Congratulations to Liyu and Christian for winning prizes at the department poster competion!
03/22/2024
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Triangular Mott paper published
Our paper on site-resolved imaging of triangular Mott insulators is finally published - with editors' suggestion.
https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.108.L061301
12/13/2023
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3 cavalier symposium
Wyndham White presented a poster on our interdisciplinary project towards confining superfluid helium with cesium coatings.
05/03/2023
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New experiment!
We are grateful to AFOSR for funding our new experiment on large-scale entanglement in a cryogenic ytterbium tweezer array through award FA9550-23-1-0166.
04/01/2023
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Poster Prize
Congratulations to Jirayu for winning the poster prize at the 2023 Annual Physics Graduate Research Poster Session!
03/24/2023
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Jefferson Scholars Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship
Congratulations to Jirayu for being selected for a Jefferson Scholars Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship!
03/16/2023
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Sloan Research Fellowship!
Peter received a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship.
https://sloan.org/fellowships/2023-Fellows
02/15/2023
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Triangular Mott insulators and spin-spin correlations on arxiv!
Our manuscript on site-resolved imaging of fermionic triangular Mott insulators and spin-spin correlations is now available on arXiv. Congratulations to the team!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14895
10/26/2022
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DURIP award!
We thank ONR for funding a laser system for Rydberg excitation of lithium on award N00014-22-1-2681 !
https://www.cto.mil/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/fy22-durip-selected-projects.pdf
09/01/2022
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NLCE paper published
Congratulations to Davis for his paper on Numerical Linked-Cluster Expansions of the triangular Hubbard model! It appeared on PRA today.
http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.106.013310
07/11/2022
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Goodbye Jin!
Congratulations to Jin for starting his new postdoctoral position at the Dypole experiment in the Ketterle group at MIT!
https://dypole.mit.edu/
05/31/2022
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Congratulatins Davis!
Congratulations on your graduation and receiving a Stephen Thornton award in Physics for undergraduate research!
https://www.phys.virginia.edu/Announcements/Newsletter/?ISSUE=Vol11Num01.pdf
05/21/2022
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Triangular lattice Mott insulators!
Site-resolved imaging of triangular lattice fermionic Mott insulators has arrived!
11/28/2021
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Large Mott insulators in square lattice
With some more work on the Mott insulators in the square lattice, they now look large and cold.
08/31/2021
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Mott insulator!
We saw our first Mott insulator in the square lattice today! Congratulations to the team for achieving this important milestone less than three years after start of the lab! We are looking forward to trying our triangular lattice soon.
08/16/2021
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Caltech FUTURE 2021
Congratulations to Rose Knight to her acceptance to the Caltech FUTURE program!
https://future.pma.caltech.edu/
08/14/2021
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Quantum Wakes
New paper together with our theory collaborators on quantum wakes in lattice fermions!
https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.033112
08/03/2021
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Insight Awards 2021
Our picture of lithium atoms in the triangular lattice won the 2021 Andor Insight Award in the category Physical Sciences! Congratulations to the team!
https://andor.oxinst.com/insight-awards
07/31/2021
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NSF CAREER Award
Peter has received a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation!
07/15/2021
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Jeffress Trust funding
Peter was selected as a 2021 Jeffress Trust Awards Program in Interdisciplinary Research recipient. Thanks to the Jeffress Trust for the support!
06/30/2021
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First paper published!
Our first publication from our triangular-lattice lithium quantum gas microscope at the University of Virginia appeared today on PRX Quantum! Congratulations to the team!
https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2.020344
06/21/2021
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Rydberg dressing of fermions
Rydberg dressing of itinerant fermions has arrived! The paper "Quench Dynamics of a Fermi Gas with Strong Nonlocal Interactions" in collaboration with the Bakr group in Princeton is now published in PRX. It demonstrates the implementation of a Hubbard model with nearest neighbor interactions V that exceed the tunneling t using Rydberg dressing.
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021036
05/17/2021
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Beitchman Summer Research Award
Congratulations to Jirayu for receiving The Beitchman Award for Innovative Graduate Student Research in Physics in honor of Robert V. Coleman and Bascom S. Deaver, Jr.! We are grateful for the support by James G. Beitchman.
05/05/2021
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Jefferson Trust Grant
We received funding from the Jefferson Trust of the Alumni Association of UVa. Thank you for the support!
04/21/2021
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A triangular-lattice quantum gas microscope
Our manuscript on site-resolved imaging of ultracold fermions in the triangular lattice is now available on arXiv.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11862
02/23/2021
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Single fermions in triangular lattice!
We just took first images of individual fermionic lithium atoms in a triangular lattice with lattice spacing of about one micrometer! Congratulations to the team! This picture is a fantastic Christmas present!
12/17/2020
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Single atoms!
We just imaged our first lithium 6 atoms - with single-site resolution in the optical lattice! Congratulations to the team - Jin, Liyu, Jirayu. They pushed this through in these difficult times in record time of 26 months. The color scheme is still somewhat unstable though.
11/06/2020
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Degenerate Fermi gas!
We finally took some time to determine temperatures of non-interacting Fermi gases properly. Here, a high-resolution radial profile of an in-situ picture of our degenerate Fermi gas with a temperature of about one tenth of the Fermi energy.
That is about as cold as can be measured with this technique! The temperature is determined from the Fermi fit function (red).
There are clear deviations from a Gaussian (black), which is the shape of a thermal gas.
10/13/2020
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Raman sidebands
Our Raman laser beams are aligned and we see resolved sidebands in the triangular lattice.
09/10/2020
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Triangular lattice
Who thought that crossing three laser beams can be that hard? We got our triangular optical lattice and it might be the deepest in the world. The picture shows the matter-wave interference pattern of a molecular BEC after a short interaction with the lattice and nicely represents the triangular symmetry.
07/28/2020
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Optical lattice
We aligned the first optical lattice and observed Kapitza-Dirac diffraction.
07/03/2020
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Mitchell Summer Scholarship
Congratulations to Davis for receiving a Mitchell Summer Scholarship!
05/08/2020
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Two-dimensional gas
We loaded our molecular BEC into a pancake trap and observed the 2D gas through our microscope.
05/01/2020
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mBEC!
We observed our first molecular Bose-Einstein condensate of lithium 6! The picture shows a time-of-flight series in 1ms steps demonstrating inversion of aspect ratio - a key signature of Bose-Einstein condensates. Congratulations to the whole team - in particular Jin, Jirayu, Liyu, Jae - for making this happen only 1.5 years after the start of the lab. Unbelievable!
03/19/2020
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Making Research Happen
Our lab is featured in the facilities management video "The McCormick Zone Team: Making Research Happen".
https://youtu.be/bW6ON2b11UI
02/24/2020
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Crossed dipole trap
After taming our 300W laser, we have atoms in our crossed dipole trap!
02/20/2020
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First MOT!
We have lithium 6 atoms in our magneto-optical trap!
11/11/2019
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First fluorescence!
First fluorescence observed from lithium beam from oven. See difference between top and bottom image.
11/08/2019
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High pressure water cooling
Finally, after resolving major issues with our high-pressure cooling system, we are up and running with 400psi.
10/31/2019
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Magnetic field coils in place
After some extended plumbing and cabling work we have finally all magnetic fields coils connected and ready to go.
10/02/2019
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Vacuum chamber assembled!
We finally assembled the last part of the vacuum chamber including the Zeeman slower.
06/24/2019
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Oven section
Baking of the oven section of the vacuum chamber is complete. Setup of the remaining part of the vacuum chamber will start soon.
05/23/2019
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Lithium spectroscopy
The laser system is coming along. We got our first lithium spectroscopy signals.
05/03/2019
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Optical tables ready
Optical tables including cages and air filters are ready for building the setup. By now some lasers and the parts for the vacuum chamber arrived.
02/19/2019
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Optical tables are in place!
Optical tables are at their place and we finally finished the unistrut second ceiling.
11/15/2018
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Optical tables on the way
The two optical tables were moved into the lab today.
10/09/2018
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Is it christmas already?
Parts for the experimental setup are arriving.
10/08/2018
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Lab starting!
Lab for ultracold quantum matter starts at UVa.
08/25/2018
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (2047275).
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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