About
Professor Leanhardt's research focuses on tabletop experiments with quantum gases at the lowest achievable temperatures in the Universe, where particles lose their individuality and acquire wave-like properties. Ultracold gases have a broad range of applications, including atom interferometry, metrology, and quantum information science. Moreover, these gases form a quantum many-body system with tunable interactions that can emulate various condensed matter phenomena.
In addition to exploring these topics, Professor Leanhardt plans to use ultracold gases to probe fundamental questions of nature, such as the strength of gravity at short length scales and the possibility of symmetry violation in the form of permanent electric dipole moments. These low energy laboratory-based experiments test elementary particle theories (such as Supersymmetry) at the TeV energy scale and provide complementary data to high energy, collider-based experiments at Fermilab and CERN.
Selected Publications
Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells by Using Atomic Clock Shifts, (G.K. Campbell, J. Mun, M. Boyd, P. Medley, A.E. Leanhardt, L.G. Marcassa, D.E. Pritchard, W. Ketterle), Science 313, 649 (2006).
Photon Recoil Momentum in Dispersive Media, (G.K. Campbell, A.E. Leanhardt, J. Mun, M. Boyd, E.W. Streed, W. Ketterle, D.E. Pritchard), Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 170403 (2005).
Atom Interferometry with Bose-Einstein Condensates in a Double-Well Potential, (Y. Shin, M. Saba, T.A. Pasquini, W. Ketterle, D.E. Pritchard, A.E. Leanhardt), Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 050405 (2004).
Cooling Bose-Einstein Condensates Below 500 Picokelvin, (A.E. Leanhardt, T.A. Pasquini, M. Saba, A. Schirotzek, Y. Shin, D. Kielpinski, D.E. Pritchard, W. Ketterle), Science 301, 1513 (2003).
Imprinting Vortices in a Bose-Einstein Condensate using Topological Phases, (A.E. Leanhardt, A. Görlitz, A.P. Chikkatur, D. Kielpinski, Y. Shin, D.E. Pritchard, W. Ketterle), Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 190403 (2002).
Propagation of Bose-Einstein Condensates in a Magnetic Waveguide, (A.E. Leanhardt, A.P. Chikkatur, D. Kielpinski, Y. Shin, T.L. Gustavson, W. Ketterle, D.E. Pritchard), Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 040401 (2002).
