Briefly, I am from St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England. I read undergraduate physics at the University of Sussex, England with a year at the Albert-Ludwig's Universitat, Freiburg, Germany. I am currently working on my Ph.D. in the Quantum Optics group of Prof. Juha Javanainen at the University of Connecticut. My home town, St. Albans. Resume vCard
Degrees
MPhys, Physics with European Studies, University of Sussex, U.K., 1998
MSc, Physics, University of Connecticut, USA, 2003
My thesis research in the Quantum Optics Group at the University of Connecticut centres around a zero temperature mean field model describing the magnetoassociation of condensate bosons via an appropriately tuned Feschbach resonance. Traditional mean-field theories in condensed matter physics along with quantum optics inspired our approach, which was to investigate a Hamiltonian describing the coupling between a uniform condensate of bosonic molecules and atom pairs with momenta $\mathbf{k}$ and $-\mathbf{k}$.
We solved for the steady state equations for the creation operator of the molecular condensate, the atomic condensate, the number operator for non-condensed bosonic atoms as well as the anomalous pairing operator in the Heisneberg picture. The casting of the equations in terms of the expectation values of the number and pairing operators for the non-condensed atoms, the destruction operators for both the atomic and molecular condensastes and the use of the Bogoliubov approximation make the exercise one in the calculation of purely classical quantities.
My thesis research in the Quantum Optics Group at the University of Connecticut centres around a zero temperature mean field model describing the magnetoassociation of condensate bosons via an appropriately tuned Feschbach resonance. Traditional mean-field theories in condensed matter physics along with quantum optics inspired our approach, which was to investigate a Hamiltonian describing the coupling between a uniform condensate of bosonic molecules and atom pairs with momenta $\mathbf{k}$ and $-\mathbf{k}$.
We solved for the steady state equations for the creation operator of the molecular condensate, the atomic condensate, the number operator for non-condensed bosonic atoms as well as the anomalous pairing operator in the Heisneberg picture. The casting of the equations in terms of the expectation values of the number and pairing operators for the non-condensed atoms, the destruction operators for both the atomic and molecular condensastes and the use of the Bogoliubov approximation make the exercise one in the calculation of purely classical quantities.
The problem described has many degrees of freedom and so we choose to make it tractable by disregarding the molecules other than those which form the uniform condensate discussed above. One still has too many solutions and so we impose the condition of \emph{maximal pairing} which requires that atoms only arrive either in the zero momentum condensate or in pairs which have zero total momentum. This is nothing other than the condition which is applied in the usual \emph{BCS} description of paired fermions, and which we used in earlier work describing a model very similar to that outlined above which indeed concerned paired fermions coupled to a \emph{BEC} rather than bosons.
A further statement of particle number conservation gives enough equations to solve for the five quantities discussed above.
Although experiments on the steady state conversion of bosonic atoms to molecules via Feschbach resonances seem at the moment to be somewhat unfeasible, recent history has shown that experimental techniques are advancing with such celerity that it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may be so in the near future. Indeed the method of Feschbach magnetoassociation or the closely analogous photoassociation, which our group has also studied in the recent past, could prove to be a feasible method for the production of a molecular condensate from an atomic one rather than the direct cooling of a collection of molecules, for which the standard methods involving lasers and magnetic fields prove problematic.
Our interest in the fermion-boson version of the problem is related to the current interest in the wider community around the \emph{BEC-BCS} crossover, and the boson equivalent is thus interesting to us in and of itself inasmuch as one would like to make a comparison between the boson and fermion cases to determine whether and to what degree the different statistics affect the problem.
The problem described has many degrees of freedom and so we choose to make it tractable by disregarding the molecules other than those which form the uniform condensate discussed above. One still has too many solutions and so we impose the condition of \emph{maximal pairing} which requires that atoms only arrive either in the zero momentum condensate or in pairs which have zero total momentum. This is nothing other than the condition which is applied in the usual \emph{BCS} description of paired fermions, and which we used in earlier work describing a model very similar to that outlined above which indeed concerned paired fermions coupled to a \emph{BEC} rather than bosons.
A further statement of particle number conservation gives enough equations to solve for the five quantities discussed above.
Although experiments on the steady state conversion of bosonic atoms to molecules via Feschbach resonances seem at the moment to be somewhat unfeasible, recent history has shown that experimental techniques are advancing with such celerity that it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may be so in the near future. Indeed the method of Feschbach magnetoassociation or the closely analogous photoassociation, which our group has also studied in the recent past, could prove to be a feasible method for the production of a molecular condensate from an atomic one rather than the direct cooling of a collection of molecules, for which the standard methods involving lasers and magnetic fields prove problematic.
Our interest in the fermion-boson version of the problem is related to the current interest in the wider community around the \emph{BEC-BCS} crossover, and the boson equivalent is thus interesting to us in and of itself inasmuch as one would like to make a comparison between the boson and fermion cases to determine whether and to what degree the different statistics affect the problem.
