Quantum mechanics places limits on the minimum energy of a harmonic oscillator via the ever-present “zero-point” fluctuations of the quantum ground state. Through squeezing, however, it is possible to decrease the noise of a single motional quadrature below the zero-point level as long as noise is added to the orthogonal quadrature. While squeezing below the quantum noise level was achieved …

The past decade has seen the emergence of the so-called “concordance model” of cosmology. In this model, the Universe started about 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang and is now dominated by dark matter and dark energy. Together this poorly understood “dark sector” makes up about 95% of the Universe, but the nature of these phenomena remains elusive. …

The South Pole Telescope is the largest Cosmic Microwave Background telescope in the world. Its high-resolution maps were the first to show evidence of so-called B-mode polarization due to gravitational lensing by intervening matter. Wider maps are now shedding light on the larger-sized B-modes generated by gravity waves created a right after the big bang. I will discuss the technology …

Nanofibers are a versatile platform for applied and fundamental studies. I will present our work starting with the production and characterization of the fibers. Then I will show that Rayleigh scattering from modes on the nanofiber gives information about the diameter with sub-micron resolution. We are using nanofibers for quantum optics and quantum information studies. We use the evanescent fields …

For classical or quantum Hamiltonians, one typically writes the kinetic energy, or dispersion, as a simple parabola for small momentum. However, particles traveling in certain periodic potentials (i.e. lattices) may have a dispersion that is minimized at multiple values of momentum or that depends upon the fourth power of momentum, preventing such a simple description. My collaborators and I have …

What happens when the strength of interactions between atoms is turned up to infinity? What about when one mixes two types of superfluids? In this talk, we will explore how ultracold atomic gases are used to create and probe these types of systems. I will discuss our recent success producing and studying extreme quantum states in ultracold lithium gases including …

Atomic gases cooled to nanokelvin temperatures can be used to study the physics governing exotic many-body quantum systems, some of which are too complicated for computer simulation. Several many-body systems, including superconductors and neutron stars, exhibit frictionless flow, or superfluidity. We experimentally probe the fermion pairing that leads to superfluidity using laser-trapped clouds of ultracold lithium atoms in two spin …

New work has shown how to complete the correspondence between the physics of black holes and the laws of thermodynamics by incorporating volume and pressure into the formalism. This results in a change in the interpretation of the black hole's mass, and may give a new handle on understanding aspects of theories of gravity with non-vanishing cosmological constant. This subject …

Granular materials are integral to many parts of our daily lives, from the coffee beans that fuel our mornings to the coal that fuels our power plants. At first glance, these materials might appear simple: macroscopic dry, cohesionless particles which interact only by contact forces. However, they represent a complicated phase of matter neither wholly solid nor wholly liquid: a …

Our modern account of cosmic history begins with a period of extraordinarily rapid expansion known as inflation. This epoch established the large-scale geometry and uniformity of our universe, as well as sowing the seeds of later galaxy formation. Inflation should further have imprinted a spectrum of primordial gravitational waves onto the universe at cosmological scales. These gravitational waves should have …

Kaew Tinyanont, Jim Wu, Miranda Thompson, Alex Kendrick, Allison Mis, Luke St Marie, and Celeste Melamed speak about their research experiences.

Almost everyone has heard of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and, while stifling a yawn, can regurgitate its particle content: six quarks, a handful of force particles like the photon and gluon, and of course now the Higgs boson. But what many fewer enjoy is an appreciation for the deep underlying mathematical structure that, once grasped, reduces the principles …

Billions of years in the future, our Sun will eventually run out of all of its fuel and will turn into an extraordinarily dense, Earth-sized star known as a white dwarf. Most white dwarfs, including our future Sun, slowly fade into oblivion, but if they can steal matter from another nearby star, they can rejuvenate themselves. Many such “new stars”, …

“For decades circumstantial evidence from observational cosmology has suggested that our universe may have started with a bang — an initial violent explosion and expansion of space known as inflation. As the universe expanded, it cooled down from an initial super hot and opaque primordial soup of mass and energy. At some point around 300,000 years after the initial bang, …