News

Jimmy received the Kevin Strecker Award!! 2024-05-03 : Jimmy Yeh received the Kevin Strecker Award in recognition of his excellent performance on the qualifying exam and research proposal. Well done, Jimmy!
Eva has defended her PhD thesis! 2024-01-05 : Congratulations to Eva, who has successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Decoherence of Matter-Wave Breathers in Lithium Bose Einstein-Condensates”. We wish Eva continued success upon her future career at Booz Allen Hamilton!
Welcome Ellie, Mike and Sara! 2023-06-29 : We welcome Ellie, Mike, and Sarah to our group during the summer. Ellie is a senior student from Middlebury College, Vermont. She is working on the circuit and low-noise power supply for the p-wave superfluid experiment. Mike is a Rice undergraduate student. He is building an AOM driver to be used for UV MOT narrow linewidth cooling of Lithium 6. Sarah is a senior student at the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil. She studies the granulation of a BEC by modulating the scattering length using a Feshbach resonance. Welcome to Hulet Lab!!
Welcome David! 2023-06-01 : We welcome David, a new Ph.D. student at Rice from Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico. He is helping to build the new apparatus to detect FFLO superconductivity with Jimmy.
New Paper on the spin-incoherent Luttinger Liquid! 2023-05-31 : Our paper “Thermal disruption of a Luttinger liquid” has been published in Nature Communications. Our results probe the crossover between the coherent and incoherent regimes of the Luttinger liquid, and elucidate the interplay between the charge and the spin degrees of freedom in this regime. Nature Communications volume 14, Article number: 3154 (2023)
Danyel has defended his PhD thesis! 2022-11-28 : Congratulations to Danyel, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Spin-charge separation in a 1D Fermi gas with tunable interaction”. Good Job! Dr. Cavazos! We wish Danyel continued success upon his move to Chicago working for the University of Chicago!
Welcome Jimmy! 2022-09-08 : We welcome Jimmy Yeh, a new PhD student at Rice from the Indiana University, to our group. At Indiana, he worked with a Rice PhD, Brian DeSalvo. Jimmy has a masters degree from the National Taiwan University. He is working on the FFLO project.
Postdoctoral Research Associate Job Opening 2022-07-14 : Rice University announces an opening for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in ultracold atomic physics. The successful applicant will be a key member of an experimental program to use ultracold atomic fermions in optical lattices as a platform to realize strongly correlated many-body states of matter. The current goal is to realize a supersolid (FFLO superconductor) in the crossover region between one and three dimensions using fermionic lithium. This position offers an excellent opportunity to conduct research at the forefront of the exciting field of ultracold atomic gases. A Ph.D. in relevant areas of experimental atomic or condensed matter physics is required. Qualified candidates are encouraged to contact Prof. R. Hulet randy@rice.edu for further information, or view http://atomcool.rice.edu.
Spin-charge separation paper featured in AZO Quantum 2022-07-04 : Our paper “Spin-charge separation in a 1D Fermi gas with tunable interactions” was recently featured in an article published in AZO Quantum. You can access the full article here
Spin-charge separation paper featured in Rice News! 2022-06-16 : Our recent paper on spin-charge separation was featured at Rice News! You can read the full press release here, and also watch a great video they made explaining our experiment. Thank you Jade Boyd, Jeff Fitlow and Brandon Martin for this great work!
Jake has defended his PhD thesis! 2022-05-10 : Congratulations to Jake, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “The Search For FFLO in a Quasi-One-Dimensional Ultracold Fermi Gas”. We thank Jake, and wish for continued sucess!
New paper on spin-charge separation! 2022-04-24 : Our paper “Spin-charge separation in a 1D Fermi gas with tunable interactions” has been accepted for publication in Science. The spatial separation of spin and charge excitations has been a hallmark of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) theory for over 70 years. We are able to independently excite either the charge or the spin mode in our quasi-1D system using Bragg spectroscopy. Our work is the first to directly observe spin-charge separation as a function of interactions. The separate charge and spin sectors are clearly demonstrated by the data. We also observe non-linear effects, paving the way for further exploration of non-linear Luttinger liquids. Congratulations to our team here at Rice and our collaborators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and SISSA (Italy). Science, 376, 6599 (2022)
Ya-Ting has defended her PhD thesis! 2021-05-10 : Congratulations to Ya-Ting, who has successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Collisional loss of one-dimensional fermions near a p-wave Feshbach resonance”. We wish Ya-Ting continued success upon her move to New Jersey working for Argo AI!
Henry has defended his PhD thesis! 2021-05-10 : Congratulations to Henry, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Solitons and Breathers in Bose–Einstein Condensates”. We wish Henry continued success upon his move to Maryland as a post-doc!
Welcome Ricardo! 2021-01-20 : We welcome Ricardo Espinoza, a new PhD student at Rice.
Welcome Aashish! 2021-01-15 : We welcome Aashish Kafle, a new PhD student at Rice.
New paper on Matter-Wave Breathers! 2020-09-30 : Our paper “Creation and characterization of matter-wave breathers” has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. A breather is an excited state of a soliton. Since it is a superposition of multiple fundamental solitons, its density profile oscillates periodically. We have created matter-wave breathers of two and three solitons in a 7Li Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) by quenching the atomic interaction. This work paves ways for studying beyond-mean-field quantum effects in a BEC.
New Paper on the p-Wave Feshbach Resonance in quasi-1D! 2020-09-29 : We have posted a preprint entitled “Collisional loss of one-dimensional fermions near a p-wave Feshbach resonance”. This work is the first detailed experimental study of p-wave collisions in a 1D Fermi gas. We have found a possible suppression of dimer relaxation rate with strong quasi-1D confinement. We hope that these results will pave the way to observing a p-wave superfluid state. arXiv:2007.03723(2020)
Working at the Hulet Lab as a first year! 2020-09-28 : Watch our student-made video on what it’s like to work here as a new student!
New Paper on the Methods for Preparing Quantum Gases of Lithium! 2020-01-27 : A review article of the methods developed for cooling and trapping lithium has appeared in the Reviews of Scientific Instruments. Congratulations to Jason, Ruwan, and Randy! Rev. Sci. Instrum. 91, 011101 (2020).
Jason is off to IonQ as a Senior Physicist! 2019-10-11 : Congratulations and best wishes to Jason on his new job, and for all his accomplishments at Rice. We will miss you!
Welcome Bhagwan! 2019-09-11 : We welcome Bhagwan Signh, a new PhD student at Rice from the University of Houston, to our group. Bhagwan will start working on a project to design a new apparatus chamber with high numerical aperature windows to further probe AFM ordering in a 3D optical lattice confining fermions.
Congratulations Danyel! 2019-08-09 : Danyel received a prize for the best presentation at the annual Smalley-Curl Institute Summer Research Colloquim for his presentation on p-wave pairing in one dimension.
Farewell Daniel! 2019-08-09 : We all thank Daniel for a great, productive summer working on making a polarimeter for 671nm light. We wish him success in his upcoming year studying abroad in Switzerland at EPFL.
Welcome Daniel! 2019-06-03 : We welcome Daniel Augusto Ortuño González, a summer student from Monterrey Tech, to our group this summer. Daniel will work on engineering a polarimeter that will help us analyze the exact polarization of 671nm light.
New paper on Parametric Excitation of BECs is published! 2019-03-25 : Our paper demonstrating both experimentally and theoretically the response of shaking a Bose-Einstein condensate was published today in Physical Review X. We indentified two regimes that depend upon frequency and modulation strength: One, forms repeatable wave patterns known as Faraday waves, and the second creates unexpected grains that may arise from shaking-induced quantum correlations. Phys. Rev. X 9, 011052 (2019). Summary.
New paper on speed of sound of a 1D Fermi gas published! 2018-09-04 : Our paper reporting the measurement of the speed of charge density waves in a one-dimensional Fermi gas was published today in the Physical Review Letters. This work, in collaboration with Thierry Giamarchi’s group in Geneva, is the first detailed measurement of the interaction dependence of the speed of sound in a 1D Fermi gas. Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 103001.
We welcome our new post-doc Ruwan Senaratne! 2018-08-20 : Ruwan has joined us from UCSB where he did his PhD thesis on quantum simulation of ultrafast dynamics using ultracold atoms. At Rice, Ruwan will work on fermions confined to an optical lattice.
We thank Thibault Grillon for a great summer internship! 2018-08-10 : Thibault worked on creating and implementing a stable offset laser for use on cooling and trapping fermionic lithium. We hope he enjoyed his time at Rice, and we wish him luck in his final year at the Institut d’Optique.
Congratulations to Danyel for being awarded a CONACTY Fellowship! 2018-06-01 : Danyel was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia of Mexico. These are very competitive fellowships as only a small number are awarded per year.
Ernie has defended his PhD thesis! 2018-05-10 : Congratulations to Ernie Yang, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Dynamical Response of an Interacting 1-Dimensional Fermi Gas.” We wish Ernie continued success upon his move to Silicon Valley to work in the high-tech industry!
Congratulations Eduardo! 2018-05-10 : Congratulations to Eduardo Ibarra who has been awarded the 2018 Tom W. Bonner Book Prize by the Department of Physics and Astronomy!
Rice AMO Program Ranked 8th in the US! 2018-03-22 : The 2018 rankings of graduate programs in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics has Rice University ranked 8th in the country, right behind Caltech and just ahead of the University of Chicago. Here is the complete list:
Anna Departs for Oxford 2018-03-07 : Bon Voyage to Anna, who is returning to the UK to begin a post-doctoral position with Ian Walmsley at Oxford. We wish Anna much success (and not too much rain) in Oxford!
Radio Interview 2018-01-24 : Randy was interviewed on the radio by Aspen (Colorado) high school students: Radio Physics: Dr. Randall Hulet Explains Cold Atoms and Superconductivity
Welcome Danyel and Eduardo! 2018-01-11 : We welcome Danyel and Eduardo today as full members of our lab!
Danyel returns to Monterrey Tech to talk about his experience at Rice. 2017-10-06 : Danyel returns to his alma mater, Monterrey Tech, to talk to their students about his experience as a first year graduate student at Rice.
Randy has been elected as a Fellow of the Optical Society of America! 2017-09-25 : Randy has been elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. The citation reads: “For pioneering achievements in the field of ultracold atomic gases, including the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation with attractive interactions and groundbreaking studies of atomic fermions.”
Danyel has received a CONACyT National Fellowship! 2017-08-11 : Danyel has received a fellowship from the Mexican Science and Technology Foundation to fund his graduate studies at Rice. Congratulations Danyel!
Randy Receives the 2017 Herbert Walther Award! 2017-07-08 : We are pleased to announce that Randy is the recipient of the 2017 Herbert Walther Award from the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) and The Optical Society of America. Congratulations!
Welcome Eduardo, Danyel, and Jinggang! 2017-06-01 : We welcome three new students to our lab this summer: Eduardo, Danyel, and Jinggang. Eduardo and Danyel are incoming first year graduate students from UNAM and the Monterrey Institute of Technology respectively, and Jinggang will be spending several months with us in an internship as he finishes his undergraduate program in Peking.
Melissa receives the Wilson Award! 2017-05-12 : Melissa Revelle is a co-recipient of the 2016-2017 Wilson Award for the best PhD research and thesis in our Department. She receives a $5,000 check and her name inscribed in the plaque that names all previous award winners going back to the 1960’s. Congratulations Melissa!
Welcome to Zhenghao and Patrick 2017-05-02 : We welcome two new graduate students to our group: Zhenghao Zhao and Patrick Bagge, both of whom have just finished their first year of graduate study. Welcome Zhenghao and Patrick!
MURI Grant on Topological Matter 2017-05-02 : We have been awarded a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Army. The grant funds a team of scientists from UC-Santa Barbara, Columbia, UC-Berkely, University of Pittsburgh, Caltech, as well as our group at Rice to perform research on topological matter. The tile of our project is: “Abelian bridge to nonabelian anyons in ultra-cold atoms and graphene”.
New paper on the formation of soliton trains! 2017-04-28 : Jason, Henry, and Randy’s manuscript on the formation of soliton trains by quenching the interactions of a repulsively interacting BEC to an attractive one has been published in Science! This work provides new insight on how and why neighboring solitions repel one another.
Best Wishes to Melissa! 2016-11-30 : It’s been a big month for Melissa - She started a post-doc at the Sandia National Laboratories, where she will be working on quantum information. Her paper on the dimensional crossover in spin-polarized Fermi gases has just been accepted and published in the Physical Review Letters. We wish Melissa continued success!
Randy has received the Walther Award! 2016-11-17 : Randy has been awarded the 2017 Herbert Walther Award. The citation reads: “For pioneering achievements in the field of ultracold atomic gases, including the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation with attractive interactions and groundbreaking studies of atomic fermions.”
Melissa has defended her PhD thesis! 2016-09-14 : Melissa Revelle has defended and submitted her thesis entitled “Quasi-One-Dimensional Ultracold Fermi Gases.” In addition, her paper entitled “1D to 3D Crossover of a Spin-Imbalanced Fermi Gas”, has now been submitted for review: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06986.
New Paper! 2016-09-02 : A new paper describing the results of a theoretical collaboration with Vincent Liu’s group at the University of Pittsburgh was published today. This paper shows that a p-wave superfluid can be created using an s-wave Feshbach resonance and imbalanced Fermi surfaces. We hope that this may be a viable route to producing a topological superfluid. Physical Review A 94, 031602 (2016). PDF
Gilbert Departs for Taiwan 2016-06-28 : A big “Thank You” goes to Gilbert Shih, who has finished a 5 month internship in our laboratory. Gilbert has just graduated from the National Taiwan University and will now begin his mandatory 1 year civil service in Taiwan. Gilbert and Ernie set up 1D Bragg spectroscopy in our lab.
New Paper! 2016-05-23 : Melissa has submitted a preprint on the observation of the 1D-3D dimensional crossover in a spin-imbalanced Fermi gas! We hope that these results will pave the way to observing the FFLO superfluid state. arXiv:1605.06986 (2016). PDF
Welcome Madeleine! 2016-05-23 : We welcome Madeleine Adrien, a summer student from the Institut d’Optique, to our group this summer. Madeleine will work with the BEC team to frequency lock a 647 nm laser to an iodine line.
We welcome a new post-doc to our group, Anna Marchant! 2016-03-17 : We welcome a new post-doc to our group, Anna Marchant! Anna completed her PhD at the University of Durham, UK, on the interaction of matter-wave solitons with barriers. Anna will work on fermion experiments at Rice.
Hot Paper 2016-03-16 : Our 2015 Nature paper reporting antiferromagnetic order (Russ Hart, Pedro Duarte, et al), has been deemed a “Hot Paper” by ISI: “This hot paper was published in the past two years and received enough citations in September/October 2015 to place it in the top 0.1% of papers in its academic field.”
DURIP Award 2016-03-04 : We have been selected to receive an award from the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) to purchase an ultra-stable infrared laser! The competition for this year’s DURIP awards is described in this DoD press release: Link The laser will be used to produce a super-stable lattice that will minimize heating from laser intensity noise, and thus, facilitate achieving even lower temperatures in quantum magnetism experiment.
New Paper Published 2015-12-09 : We are pleased to announce that our recent paper “Phase Diagram of a Strongly-Interacting Spin-Imbalanced Fermi Gas” has been published in Physical Review A.
Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic Physics 2015-10-05 : Randy is the 2016 recipient of the Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic Physics, awarded by the American Physical Society! Randy will receive the Prize in May 2016 at the annual DAMOP meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.
Welcome the addition of undergraduate summer interns to our group! 2015-06-30 : We welcome the addition of undergraduate summer interns Shanel Wu (Harvey Mudd College), Kevin Roux (Ecole sup’Optique), and Zeren Lin (Peking University) to our group!
Post-doc Ben Olsen great success in his new position with AO Sense! 2015-06-29 : We wish former post-doc Ben Olsen great success in his new position with AO Sense!
Pedro received the Rice Wilson Award for 2014. 2015-03-30 : We applaud Pedro Duarte who received the Rice University Department of Physics and Astronomy Wilson Award for 2014. The Wilson Award recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. research in the Department.
AFM Correlation in the Hubbard model 2015-02-28 : Our paper on aniferromagnetic correlation in the Hubbard model is published in Nature Here are some web stories about this work: Physics Today Science Futurity
Collisions of matter-wave solitons 2014-12-30 : Our paper on collisions of matter-wave solitons is published in Nature Physics. A summary of our work is available at 2physics.com.
Pedro Duarte for successfully defending his PhD thesis. 2014-09-30 : We congratulate Pedro Duarte for successfully defending his PhD thesis, entitled “Observation of Antiferromagnetic Correlations in the Fermi-Hubbard Model”, and wish him well in his new job at Intel, in Portland, OR
Russ Hart heads to AOSense 2014-08-01 : We congratulate former post-doc Russ Hart on his new position at AOSense. We hope it goes great!
Paul Dyke's new position 2014-02-01 : We wish the best to Paul Dyke who is headed down-under for a faculty position at Swinburne University.
Centennial Campaign 2013-09-01 : Rice University’s Brockman Hall for Physics was one of the signature gifts to the Wiess School of Natural Sciences during the university’s Centennial Campaign. Randy Hulet, the Fayez Sarofim Professor of Physics and Astronomy, discusses the positive impact the facility has had on his and his colleagues’ work.
MURI Grant 2013-07-01 : The Hulet Group received a MURI grant from the US Army to study nonequilibrium dynamics of cold atoms confined to optical lattices. Their particular focus will be on quantum gases of fermionic lithium in one dimension.
Kevin E. Strecker Award 2012-11-01 : In memory of Kevin Strecker, who earned his Ph.D. from the Rice University Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2004, the Kevin E. Strecker Award has been established to recognize the most outstanding Master’s thesis each year. Funds are being raised to endow the award.
Move into new lab 2011-06-01 : Experiments back up and running after moving from the Space Science building to the new Brockman Hall for Physics.
Begin of the move 2011-03-01 : The experiment tables of the AMO labs begin moving into Brockman Hall.
Willis E. Lamb Award 2011-01-01 : Professor Hulet is a winner of the 2011 Willis E. Lamb Award “for Laser Science and Quantum Optics for pioneering studies of ultra cold Bose and Fermi systems and their application to the understanding of fundamental processes.”
Breakthrough of the Year 2010-12-01 : 1D Fermion Quantum Simulator work named runner up in Science for “Breakthrough of the Year”! Randy was also featured in an interview about this in the Houston Chronicle.
New Paper Published 2010-09-30 : Our paper on a 1D imbalanced Fermi gas is published in Nature.
New Paper Published 2010-09-08 : Our paper on dissipative flow of a BEC in a random potential is published in Physical Review A.
Picture of the day 2010-02-01 : An image created using a degenerate mixuter of lithium 6 and lithium 7, contrasting the fundamental difference between Bosons and Fermions is once again featured as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Review of Efimov physics 2010-01-01 : Ferlaino and Grimm review the field: Forty Years of Efimov physics: How a bizarre prediction turned into a hot topic, Physics 3, 9 (2010). Media devours Efimov physics! Here’s one story from Arstechnica.
Quantum trios 2009-12-02 : “Rice physicists find reappearing quantum trios”. Study of ultracold atoms proves theory about universal quantum mechanism. Perspective by G. Modugno published in Science 16 Dec 2009
Bragg scattering 2009-12-01 : “Detecting antiferromagnetism of atoms in an optical lattice via optical Bragg scattering” accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A.
New Paper Published 2009-11-19 : Scott and Dan’s paper “Universality in Three and Four-Body Bound States of Ultracold Atoms” published in Science.
Crystal Simulator 2009-09-01 : Rice lead team awarded $5M for light-based crystal simulator.
Science Watch 2007-03-01 : A Hulet group publication recently ranked by Science Watch as one of the top 10 “Red-Hot” research papers of 2006 Adrian Cho recently recapped the history of degenerate Fermi-gas experiments in Science magazine, including coverage of the spin-imbalance experiments in our group and giving an outlook on future prospects in the field.
The Science of Ultra Cold 2006-01-16 : Professor Hulet gave a talk on January 16, 2006 titled “The Science of the Ultra Cold”, which was filmed at the Historic Wheeler Opera House in the Aspen Center for Physics.
Spin Imbalanced Fermi Gas 2006-01-01 : Superconductors form when two electrons, one spin-up and one spin-down, pair up. What happens when there are more spin-up particles than there are spin-down particles?
BEC of fermionic pairs 2005-07-07 : A Bose-Einstein condensate of fermionic atom pairs has been created. The nature of the pairs has been investigated from the BEC to the BCS regions of a Feschbach resonance using optical molecular spectroscopy.
Creating Bosonic Molecules from Fermionic Atoms 2003-08-22 : Bosonic molecules have been created from fermionic atoms of lithium 6 through an adiabatic sweep through a Feshbach resonance.
Observation of Bright Solitons 2002-05-09 : Bright solitons, composed of Bose-Einstein Condensates of lithium 7, have been observed in a single-beam optical trap. Repulsive interactions between neighboring solitons are inferred from their motion in the trap.
Dual Quantum Degeneracy 2001-03-01 : Dual quantum degeneracy has been achieved in a mixture of trapped ultra-cold bosons and fermions.