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Workshop / Seminar

Physics and Astronomy Colloquium – Dr. Doerte Blume

Online
via Zoom

About the event

The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites you to a colloquium featuring Dr. Doerte Blume, University of Oklahoma. Dr. Blume will present her talk, “Probing the helium dimer and trimer with fast, intense lasers” via Zoom.

Meet the speaker at 3:30 p.m. – join us in welcoming the speaker and for an informal chat!

https://wsu.zoom.us/j/95710823436?pwd=QlJTZzN6a25DTnJsUG44aW0vNWtzZz09 

Meeting ID: 957 1082 3436
Passcode: PhysAstro

Abstract:  Helium is the only element that remains liquid under normal pressure down to zero temperature. Below 2.17K, bulk helium-4 is superfluid. Motivated by this intriguing behavior, the properties of finite-sized helium droplets have been studied extensively over the past 30 years or so. Some properties of liquid helium-4 droplets are, just as those of nuclei, well described by the liquid drop model. The existence of the extremely fragile helium dimer was proven experimentally in 1994 in diffraction grating experiments. Since then, appreciable effort has gone into creating and characterizing trimers, tetramers and larger clusters. The excited state of the helium trimer is particularly interesting since it is an Efimov state. The existence of Efimov states, which are unique due to scale invariance and an associated limit cycle, was predicted in 1971. However, till 2015, Efimov states had — although their existence had been confirmed experimentally — not been imaged directly. Ingenious experimental advances that utilize femtosecond lasers have made it possible to directly image the static quantum mechanical density distribution of helium dimers and trimers. I will review some of these experiments and related theoretical calculations that led to the experimental detection of the excited helium trimer Efimov state. I will also discuss extensions to the time domain. Specifically, I will discuss the laser-kick induced dynamics of the fragile helium dimer. The results open the door for future studies that probe scattering length dominated few-body systems using fast, intense lasers.

 

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