Frontiers of Ultracold Atoms and Molecules

Coordinators: Ofir Alon, Immanuel Bloch, W. Vincent Liu , William Phillips

Note: This conference is now full. Thank you for your interest.

The physics of ultracold atoms and molecules has become a multidisciplinary frontier research subject in present day science. Research activities have flourished in recent years across the interfaces between atomic physics, quantum optics, condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics, and quantum information processing, as well as, to some extent, nuclear, particle, and gravitational physics. Cold gases not only promise to provide highly controllable systems, which aid the investigation of some outstanding problems within the paradigms of conventional subjects, but also to create opportunities to pursue fundamental new physics, which might previously have seemed very challenging or even impossible to realize or imagine.  Applications of ultracold gases range from quantum computers, and quantum simulators to ultra-high-precision atomic clocks and quantum metrology.

This conference will bring together experimentalists and theorists interested in the multi-disciplinary platform presented by the subject with the goal of both exploring new and emerging research areas and discussing challenges associated with these opportunities. The conference is planned as the focus week of the KITP “Beyond Standard Optical Lattices” program.

Topics to be treated at the conference include, but are not limited to:

  • Novel optical lattices
  • Bose and Fermi atomic gases
  • Molecular and dipolar gases
  • Atomic and molecular mixtures
  • Strongly correlated systems
  • Non-equilibrium physics and dynamical phenomena
  • Ultracold collisions and quantum chemistry
  • Reduced dimensional systems
  • Disordered systems
  • Applications of cold quantum gases to other areas of physics