Our main area of interest is in the area of Bose-Einstein condensation, which won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2001.  For a beginners introduction to the area, see the excellent interactive website at Physics 2000.  We currently have several active research projects in both experiment and theory in the atom optics group, and these are described in brief detail below.  

(1) Bose-Einstein condensation on an atom chip.

Our experiment creates and manipulate Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in magnetic traps formed above current carrying wires on an atom chip.  We have developed a new type of atom chip, details of which can be found here.

(2) Generating quantum correlations in cold atoms.

Much experimental work on BEC to date has generally treated the condensate as a coherent state with a (macroscopic) amplitude and phase.  However, recently there has been an explosion of interest in atomic correlations in Bose and Fermi gases.  One of our main aims is to generate and measure novel correlations, the requirements for which lead to the following project:

(3) Single atom resolution detection of cold atoms.

A condensate is comprised of individual atoms which in principle may be counted with arbitrary precision.  We are following two paths towards atom counters which will be able to achieve this task.  The first relies on photionising atoms with a sequence of laser pulses and counting the ions produced.  The second will involve bringing the condensate into a high finesse optical cavity which we plan to integrate onto future atom chips.  This will allow us to study quantum statistics of BEC and will be useful for future experiments on preparing number squeezed states from a BEC.

(4) Nonlinear dynamics and quantum chaos.

Ultra-cold atoms are well suited to studies of the transitions from classical to quantum dynamics in Hamiltonian systems, and how chaos manifests itself in quantum mechanics.  Using trap potentials achievable on an atom chip we are investigating regimes in which we can observe the transition from classical to quantum dynamics and dynamical tunnelling in a single well.