Recent Georgetown Physics graduate Mark Jreissaty (A.B. 2011) has turned his award-winning Senior Thesis into a scientific publication in the prestigious American Physical Society journal Physical Review A. Working with Prof. Marcos Rigol, a graduate student, and a post-doc, Mark studied how bosonic Mott insulators in optical lattices expand when a confining potential is turned off. In addition to advancing the understanding of these intriguing systems, the work provides the basis for a novel type of atom laser.

The development of practical devices for quantum computation will likely require interconnecting different types of subcomponents. Single photons are a promising means for this interconnection, but photons from different components need to be made indistinguishable in order to be able to carry out the computations.

The eighth installment of the Mid-Atlantic Soft Matter workshop (MASM8) will be held at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) on the 9th of December from 8:50am - 5:50 pm. To learn more about the workshop and to attend, you can go to the event website. This workshop is being sponsored by the Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology and NIST.

For nearly 70 years, physicists have speculated whether quantum fluctuations in two- or three-dimensional spin or boson systems can destabilize ordered phases. The resulting phase would then be a "quantum liquid". As emphasized in a Viewpoint by the journal Physics, postdoctoral fellow Christopher Varney and Prof. Marcos Rigol were part of a team that presented the first convincing example of a gapless quantum spin liquid in a realistic model in two dimensions.