Atom–Light Scattering in the Quantum Regime
ORAL · Invited
Abstract
Ultracold atoms and molecules provide clean platforms for exploring quantum science and technology, and light is the essential tool for manipulating and probing these systems. Yet, even for many simple quantum systems, their light scattering properties remain underexplored.
In this talk, I will show how atom–light scattering reveals novel quantum physics in several settings. For atoms in degenerate quantum gases, I will discuss how quantum statistics, phase transitions, and interactions modify atomic pair correlations and, consequently, the light scattering. For atoms released from the optical lattice, I will show how light scattering reveals the quantum-statistical Hanbury Brown–Twiss (HBT) correlations between atoms in a novel way, without detecting individual atoms.
*Ph.D. completed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with advisor Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle.
In this talk, I will show how atom–light scattering reveals novel quantum physics in several settings. For atoms in degenerate quantum gases, I will discuss how quantum statistics, phase transitions, and interactions modify atomic pair correlations and, consequently, the light scattering. For atoms released from the optical lattice, I will show how light scattering reveals the quantum-statistical Hanbury Brown–Twiss (HBT) correlations between atoms in a novel way, without detecting individual atoms.
*Ph.D. completed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with advisor Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle.
*Yu-Kun Lu is supported by the NTT Research Fellowship.
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Publication: Y. Margalit, Y.-K. Lu, F. Ç. Top, and W. Ketterle, Science 374, 976–979 (2021);
Y.-K. Lu, Y. Margalit, and W. Ketterle, Nature Physics 19, 210–214 (2023);
K. Konstantinou, Y. Zhang, P. H. C. Wong, F. Wang, Y.-K. Lu, N. Dogra, C. Eigen, T. Satoor, W. Ketterle, and Z. Hadzibabic, Nature Physics 22, 362–366 (2026).
Presenters
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Yu-Kun Lu
- MIT
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology