Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Commons^™

Fabrication Of Objectives For Imaging Ultracold Lithium, Danelle Akanova

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis develops a documented, reproducible procedure for building diffraction-limited microscope objectives entirely from catalog singlets, for imaging ultracold 6Li atoms in a ring-trap experiment. The objectives must resolve micron-scale features through a 5 mm fused-silica vacuum window, operate at multiple wavelengths, fit inside a 48 mm magnet bore, and contain no conductive or magnetic material, because the surrounding coils switch 0.1 T fields on microsecond timescales. Commercial long-working-distance objectives are universally housed in metal, which the eddy-current constraint rules out, and custom fabrication of a suitable non-conductive matched pair is estimated at nearly $200k.

The procedure is developed and …

Electronic Structure Discretization And Compression Using Diagonal Basis Sets, Casey Lee Dowdle

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Numerically solving the electronic structure problem is a fundamentally difficult problem due to the exponential growth in the dimension of the Hilbert space as the system size increases. In order to solve problems at a chemically relevant accuracy, both the choice of basis set and numerical method are important factors that are intrinsically connected.

In this thesis, we study the discretization and resulting compression of electronic Hamiltonians using diagonal basis sets. A diagonal basis set approximately diagonalizes the matrix and tensor representations of the one- and two-body potentials. This can reduce storage, simplify matrix-vector products, and lower the complexity of …

Thermal Phase Fluctuations In Narrow Superfluid Rings, Parth Sabharwal

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Remarkable advances have been made in the past decade in the ability to control superfluids in circuit-like configurations. Especially notable are the improvements in the initialization, stabilization and measurement of the circulation of superfluids in geometries with periodic boundary conditions, such as rings. This has significant implications for applications as rotation sensors, magnetometers, and in the emerging field of atomtronics. As the push towards studying supercurrents in lower dimensions and higher aspect ratios continues, in order to realize idealized experimental conditions and explore unusual quantum phases, phase fluctuations become increasingly pronounced, with the potential to destroy long-range order. In this …

Equilibrium And Quench-Dynamical Studies Of Ultracold Fermions In Ring-Shaped Optical Traps, Daniel Gordon Allman

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The unique capability to precisely tune the few and many-body configurations of
ultracold Fermi gases provides a multi-dimensional platform for studying novel, ex-
otic aspects of quantum systems. These aspects include superfluid/superconducting
phenomena supported by potentially exotic pairing mechanisms, non-equilibrium and
critical dynamics, and proposed quantum sensing or computing applications based on
atomtronics.
Ring geometries provide natural arenas for probing transport properties of super-
fluids. Metastable states of quantized superfluid flow —persistent currents— exhibit
remarkable properties, and the manner in which they form is an incredibly rich sub-
ject. Studies of quenched superfluids demonstrate that persistent currents can form
from …

Effective Non-Hermiticity And Topology In Markovian Quadratic Bosonic Dynamics, Vincent Paul Flynn

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Recently, there has been an explosion of interest in re-imagining many-body quantum phenomena beyond equilibrium. One such effort has extended the symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase classification of non-interacting fermions to driven and dissipative settings, uncovering novel topological phenomena that are not known to exist in equilibrium which may have wide-ranging applications in quantum science. Similar physics in non-interacting bosonic systems has remained elusive. Even at equilibrium, an "effective non-Hermiticity" intrinsic to bosonic Hamiltonians poses theoretical challenges. While this non-Hermiticity has been acknowledged, its implications have not been explored in-depth. Beyond this dynamical peculiarity, major roadblocks have arisen in the search …

Machine Learning For Electronic And Atomistic Simulations, Jun Yang

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The demand for accurate and efficient atomistic simulations and electronic structure calculations in materials science and quantum chemistry has motivated the development of novel computational methodologies. The rapid evolution of machine learning has brought new techniques for advancing the accuracy, efficiency, and predictive power of atomistic simulations and electronic structure calculations.

In this thesis, we explore the symmetry requirements and physics intuitions needed for developing machine-learning interatomic potentials, which are the most critical component in atomistic simulations. Specifically, we introduce a novel physics-inspired graph neural network interatomic potential that enables accurate and efficient atomistic simulations of complex materials. The machine …

Aspects On The Quantum Dynamics Of A System Coupled To A Bosonic Environment, Qidong Xu

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

In this work we study various aspects of the quantum dynamics for a system coupled to a Bosonic environment, which is described by a collection of quantum harmonic oscillators or a quantum field. We first consider two quantum mechanical oscillator system-bath models obtained by dimensionally truncating linearized gravity coupled to a massive scalar field and scalar QED, and we show that they separately map onto the phase damped oscillator model and the oscillator system subject to two-photon damping. The phase damped oscillator model also corresponds to the optomechanical system with an acoustic field environment, and we study the acoustic environment …

All-Optical Cooling Of Fermi Gases Via Pauli Inhibition Of Spontaneous Emission, Roberto Onofrio

Dartmouth Scholarship

A technique is proposed to cool Fermi gases to the regime of quantum degeneracy based on the expected inhibition of spontaneous emission due to the Pauli principle. The reduction of the linewidth for spontaneous emission originates a corresponding reduction of the Doppler temperature, which under specific conditions may give rise to a runaway process through which fermions are progressively cooled. The approach requires a combination of a magneto-optical trap as a cooling system and an optical dipole trap to enhance quantum degeneracy. This results in expected Fermi degeneracy factors T/TF comparable to the lowest values recently achieved, with potential for …

Inductive Measurement Of Optically Hyperpolarized Phosphorous Donor Nuclei In An Isotopically Enriched Silicon-28 Crystal, P. Gumann, O. Patange, C. Ramanathan, H. Haas

Dartmouth Scholarship

We experimentally demonstrate the first inductive readout of optically hyperpolarized phosphorus-31 donor nuclear spins in an isotopically enriched silicon-28 crystal. The concentration of phosphorus donors in the crystal was 1.5×1015  cm−3, 3 orders of magnitude lower than has previously been detected via direct inductive detection. The signal-to-noise ratio measured in a single free induction decay from a 1  cm3 sample (≈1015 spins) was 113. By transferring the sample to an X-band ESR spectrometer, we were able to obtain a lower bound for the nuclear spin polarization at 1.7 K of ∼64%. The 31P-T2 measured with a Hahn echo sequence was …

Exact Casimir Interaction Between Eccentric Cylinders, D. A. R. Dalvit, F. C. Lombardo, F. D. Mazzitelli, R. Onofrio

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Casimir force is the ultimate background in ongoing searches for extragravitational forces in the micrometer range. Eccentric cylinders offer favorable experimental conditions for such measurements as spurious gravitational and electrostatic effects can be minimized. Here we report on the evaluation of the exact Casimir interaction between perfectly conducting eccentric cylinders using a mode summation technique, and study different limiting cases of relevance for Casimir force measurements, with potential implications for the understanding of mechanical properties of nanotubes.

Orientation Of Optically Trapped Nonspherical Birefringent Particles, Wolfgang Singer, Timo A. Nieminen, Ursula J. Gibson, Norman R. Heckenberg

Dartmouth Scholarship

While the alignment and rotation of microparticles in optical traps have received increased attention recently, one of the earliest examples has been almost totally neglected—the alignment of particles relative to the beam axis, as opposed to about the beam axis. However, since the alignment torques determine how particles align in a trap, they are directly relevant to practical applications. Lysozyme crystals are an ideal model system to study factors determining the orientation of nonspherical birefringent particles in a trap. Both their size and their aspect ratio can be controlled by the growth parameters, and their regular shape makes computational modeling …

Dynamical Control Of Qubit Coherence: Random Versus Deterministic Schemes, Lea F. Santos, Lorenza Viola

Dartmouth Scholarship

We reexamine the problem of switching off unwanted phase evolution and decoherence in a single two-state quantum system in the light of recent results on random dynamical decoupling methods [L. Viola and E. Knill, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 060502 (2005)]. A systematic comparison with standard cyclic decoupling is effected for a variety of dynamical regimes, including the case of both semiclassical and fully quantum decoherence models. In particular, exact analytical expressions are derived for randomized control of decoherence from a bosonic environment. We investigate quantitatively control protocols based on purely deterministic, purely random, as well as hybrid design, and …

Optimal Cooling Strategies For Magnetically Trapped Atomic Fermi-Bose Mixtures, Michael Brown-Hayes, Roberto Onofrio

Dartmouth Scholarship

We discuss cooling efficiency for different-species Fermi-Bose mixtures in magnetic traps. A better heat capacity matching between the two atomic species is achieved by a proper choice of the Bose cooler and the magnetically trappable hyperfine states of the mixture. When a partial spatial overlap between the two species is also taken into account, the deepest Fermi degeneracy is obtained for an optimal value of the trapping frequency ratio between the two species. This can be achieved by assisting the magnetic trap with a deconfining light beam, as shown in the case of fermionic 6Li mixed with 23Na, 87Rb, and …

Higher-Order Evaluation Of The Critical Temperature For Interacting Homogeneous Dilute Bose Gases, Frederico F. F. De Souza Cruz, Marcus Pinto, Rudnei O. Ramos, Paulo Sena

Dartmouth Scholarship

We use the nonperturbative linear δ expansion method to evaluate analytically the coefficients c1 and c''2 that appear in the expansion for the transition temperature for a dilute, homogeneous, three-dimensional Bose gas given by Tc=T0(1+c1an1/3+[c′2ln(an1/3)+c''2]a2n2/3+O(a3n)), where T0 is the result for an ideal gas, a is the s-wave scattering length, and n is the number density. In a previous work the same method has been used to evaluate c1 to order δ2 with the result c1=3.06. Here, we push the calculation to the next two orders obtaining c1=2.45 at order δ3 and c1=1.48 at order δ4. Analyzing the topology …