School of Physics Seminar - Professor Ariel Sommer

Recent experiments have introduced box traps that hold cold atoms in boxes made of light. I will describe ongoing work to realize multi-region box traps that will enable new non-equilibrium experiments.  The multi-region trap is formed using light sheets that we control with a digital micromirror device (DMD). The light sheets will allow us to prepare different regions of the atomic cloud in different thermodynamic states, and to observe the evolution to equilibrium when the regions are suddenly brought into contact. To prepare atoms for these experiments, we capture them in a self-aligning crossed optical dipole trap (ODT). We demonstrate that the trap allows a novel way to transport the cloud of atoms, which has potential applications in quantum simulation and sensing.