My Next Home Theater System

One of the cool things about searching for a new faculty member is the prospective job candidate’s visit. I know how much stress these cause (heck, I threw up during one of mine). Subhadeep Gupta dropped by the other week to give a talk on his unltra cold atom research. During his talk he flashed the picture of his lab, at left. I was sitting next to Paula at the time and she leaned over and said "So, is that what our home theater system will look like?" 🙂 I think if you click on the picture you can get a larger version. Look at the optics on that thing!!

Subhadeep’s talk was interesting also because he has managed to capture atoms in a circular wave-guide — might like a tiny accelerator. He even sees Betatron osscilations (sorry, I couldn’t find a nice definition of them on the web!) — just as they do in the large accelerators I work with, like the one at Fermilab. Unfortunately, it will be a while before he gets his atoms moving that fast: he is using gravity to accelerate them: he tilts the ring back and forth and the atoms start moving around the ring as they fall down. It was very cool to see something I recognized from the particle physics talk in an atomic experiment context! That almost never happens!