Manipulation and Measurement of a Bose-Einstein Condensate

Project Level: Honours/Masters

Solids, liquid, gas, plasmas, are known to most but at really low temperature a new exotic state of matter emerges: the Bose-Einstein condensate where all the atoms occupy the same state and behave like a macroscopic quantum wave. It has weird properties chief among them being irrotationality and frictionless like superfluids with phase coherent like a laser but is made up of atoms instead of photons. This allows for the investigation of quantum effects at a macroscopic level!

The Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) Laboratory at UQ uses lasers and magnetic traps to contain and cool atoms down to the Bose-Einstein condensate state of matter. We explore problems of fundamental physics such as investigating turbulence in superfluids and quasiparticle systems in negative absolute temperature regimes and their consequence for underlying host physical systems. We produce emulations of other quantum and classical systems, such as pulsar glitches and the big red spot on Jupiter, and perform precision sensing, focusing on the measurement of rotation and magnetometry.