Nirav Mehta
Trinity University, TX·Physics
Researchers can now hold a single charged atom (an ion) in an electromagnetic trap and immerse it in a gas of neutral atoms cooled to near absolute zero. These hybrid systems could become tools for studying chemistry between atoms and ions, for probing the collective behavior of atomic gases, and for quantum information science.
- Fields
Physics
- Topics
atomic physics
ultracold atoms
trapped ions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Refine a one-dimensional model of atom-ion collisions with ion confinement and extend it to three dimensions, computing elastic and inelastic collision rates, time delays, and trap-induced resonances.
- Incorporate multichannel interactions from the internal magnetic structure of atoms and ions, and the effects of ion-trap micromotion, using multichannel quantum defect theory and the adiabatic hyperspherical method.
- Formulate a model of atoms colliding with two or more trapped ions, determining how a collision couples to the entangled motional state of an ion crystal.
More about the research
However, there is no full quantum-mechanical theory of how atoms collide with an ion while the trap is holding it, even though experiments already create these systems.
Why it matters
A reliable theory of atom-ion collisions in traps could guide current and near-future experiments with ultracold hybrid systems. This could help these systems serve as platforms for studying atom-ion chemistry, probing many-body physics, and quantum information science. The combined theoretical method may also apply to other few-body systems in physics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Paul Hess
Middlebury College, VT·Physics
Measure how strongly a single trapped ytterbium ion couples to a nearby bulk lead zirconate titanate piezoelectric resonator, detected as faster heating of the ion's motion on resonance.
Nir Navon
Yale University, CT·Physics
Test whether short-time spectral properties, measured with radio-frequency probes of synthetic spins, already encode the final outcome of thermalization in a strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gas.
Akimasa Miyake
University of New Mexico, NM·Physics
Determine how symmetry-protected topological order, a collective entanglement found in frustrated quantum spin systems, serves as a resource for quantum computation within measurement-based quantum computation.
The school
Trinity University: 3 labs on PI Pages, $6M a year on research.
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