Physics and Astronomy Colloquium – Dr. John E. Thomas

About the event

The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites you to a colloquium featuring Dr. John E. Thomas, North Carolina State University. Dr. Thomas will present his talk, “Optically-Trapped Interacting Fermi Gases”, Thursday, January 28, at 4:10 pm via Zoom.

Meet the speaker at 3:30 pm – 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: Optically-trapped, ultra-cold gases of spin ½-up and spin ½-down 6Li atoms enable “designer” interactions, offering a versatile environment for simulating exotic quantum systems.  I will discuss our latest measurements of hydrodynamic transport coefficients in the strongly interacting regime, where the cloud exhibits scale invariant, “nearly perfect” flow, analogous to that of a quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter at 2 trillion degrees that existed microseconds after the Big Bang.  Then I will discuss measurements of information scrambling in the very weakly interacting regime, where the cloud behaves as a large spin lattice in energy space, with effective long-range interactions.