Dr. Steve Maxwell – NIST – Gaithersburg, MD
Title: “Dynamics of a sodium spinor condensate”
In the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we have an ongoing experimental and theoretical effort to understand the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates of atomic sodium in an optical trap. In an optical trap, atoms in any spin state can be confined. Collisions between atoms in different spin states can give rise to collective oscillations in the spin of all atoms in the condensate. These collisions, which are antiferromagnetic in nature, also lead to a phase transition which can be seen by changing the orientation of the atoms or by changing the value of an applied magnetic field.
In this talk, I will discuss the features of this system observed by our group and explain how some of them can be understood in the context of a simple approximation. I will also introduce our computational and theoretical efforts to understand dissipation in this nominally isolated quantum system.