Defense – Tuesday 7th July at 10:00am in P-250 there will be a Masters Thesis Defense presented by Martin Kandes who will talk about “Multimode Interferometry of Bose-Einstein Condensates in a Circular Waveguide.”

Abstract:

Simple circular waveguides promise to be an ideal architecture for building high-precision inertial sensors based on guided matter-wave interferometers that exploit the coherent source of ultracold atoms provided by dilute atomic gas Bose-Einstein condensates. Using finite difference methods, we perform numerical calculations of the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation in one and two dimensions to simulate gravity-induced quantum interference between counterpropagating condensate wave packets within a simple harmonic oscillator ring. By studying the propagation dynamics of BECs inside the ring and measuring the phase shifts observed in the resulting interference patterns, we aim to understand how the interplay between multimode excitations and nonlinear, mean-field interactions will impact the performance and interferometric stability of these systems. Our results vividly illustrate many of the challenges and trade-offs that guided matter-wave interferometry experiments using BECs will likely face in the near future.

Committee Members:

Dr. Michael Bromley (Chair, Dept. of Physics),

Dr. Arlette Baljon (Dept. of Physics), and

Dr. Ricardo Carretero-Gonzalez (Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics).