Abstract: "Birds On A Wire" was a Goldie Hawn, Mel Gibson movie from the 90's. I'll do better: with Atoms On A Wire, we can now make a nearly perfect Bose (or Fermi!) gas in one dimension, a long-held holy grail of quantum field theorists - ever since exact solutions were announced way back in the sixties (remember the Beatles??). Surprisingly, no exact correlation functions were ever found, even though this is the perfect signature of the amazing transition that a Bose gas makes when it becomes Fermi-like in one dimension. Almost like Mel trying to escape Goldie in the movie. To cut a long story short - problem solved, with help from a multinational team in Australia and Holland. I'll explain how the experiments work, what the exact solutions are, how we got the correlations, and what is needed to test our predictions.

Abstract: Quantum correlated or entangled photon pairs from parametric down-conversion are one of the most powerful resources of quantum optics. In this talk, I will discuss the intriguing prospects of possessing quantum ATOM optics analog of this resource, using coherent matter-wave interactions in Bose-Einstein condensates. I will present the results of our recent study of the process of photo-dissociation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate as a potential source for generating strongly correlated `twin' atom laser beams with nearly perfect quantum squeezing in their relative particle number fluctuations.

Abstract: Before the observation of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in 1995, there was much debate about the characteristic time of formation of a BEC. Predictions ranged from almost instantaneous, to infinite (ie a BEC could not occur!). We will give an overview of quantum kinetic theory for Bose gases, and its application to the problem of condensate growth which provided the first quantitative estimates of the formation time.  We will describe experiments investigating this important non-equilibrium process and their theoretical description.  Finally we will introduce the idea of quasi-condensation, and the possibilities of observing such a state in the formation of a BEC.