2:00–3:00 pm
Please Join us:
Krutik Patel's PhD Thesis Defense
Friday, November 4,2022 at 2:00 PM CDT
Thesis title: Interactions and Excitations in Quantum Degenerate 133Cs-6Li Bose-Fermi Mixtures
Ultracold atoms are a powerful platform for studying quantum science, primarily due to their impressive tunability. I will discuss our experiments on quantum degenerate mixtures of bosonic 133Cs and fermionic 6Li with tunable interspecies interactions. While a number of atomic Bose-Fermi mixtures have been cooled to quantum degeneracy, there are still many untested theoretical proposals and opportunities for scientific exploration. This is in large part due to the unique challenges, properties, and capabilities of each particular mixture.
We have created the first degenerate mixtures of Li and Cs atoms and performed several experiments studying the role of interactions in their ground state and dynamics. The central question investigated is: "What happens to a Bose-Einstein condensate when you immerse it in a degenerate Fermi gas?" We have discovered several answers: the fermionic environment changes the effective confinement, the effective 2- and 3- body interactions, the phase diagram, and the excitations of the condensate. Our work addresses explicitly several long standing predictions in the literature and opens future opportunities for the study of strongly interacting Bose-Fermi mixtures.
Committee Members:
Cheng Chin (Chair)
Kathyrn Levin
Philippe Guyot-Sionnest
David DeMille