PIPages
Labs

Nir Navon

Yale University, CT·Physics

Leave a cup of hot coffee on a desk and it cools to room temperature. This approach to thermal equilibrium, called thermalization, is familiar in everyday life.

Fields

Physics

Topics

ultracold atoms

ultracold Fermi gas

fermions

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2029

What they work on

  1. 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.
  2. Map the conditions under which full quantum many-body evolution reduces to simple, memoryless population dynamics, varying interaction strength and timescale in a homogeneous fermionic atom gas.
  3. Probe long-time equilibration of strongly interacting ultracold fermions in regimes where no existing theory applies, establishing experimental benchmarks for nonequilibrium quantum dynamics.

More about the research

Yet how complex quantum systems with strongly interacting particles get there from states far from equilibrium is still a major open question in physics. The answer matters for understanding quantum materials, the flow of charge and heat in tiny devices, and the foundations of statistical mechanics.

Why it matters

This is basic physics research. Experimental benchmarks for how strongly interacting quantum matter reaches equilibrium could test and guide theories of quantum materials and transport. They could also strengthen ultracold atoms as quantum simulators, contributing to quantum information science.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Probing Thermalization in Strongly Interacting Quantum Matter

NSF · Jul 2026 – Jun 2029

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The school

Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.

More about Yale University

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