At the three-day conference held at the AIAS, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, about 60 early career researchers from 16 different universities took the opportunity to discuss their academic work and interest in cold atoms. Focus was on the role of cold atoms in the broad field of physics – in particular, what are the important problems in physics, which cold atomic gases can unravel?

From the many interesting talks (23 talks in total) and the intense discussions during the conference, it was clear that cold atomic gases have the potential to make breakthrough contributions to several fields in physics. They include collisional physics which is an important topic in high-energy physics, strongly correlated gases with close parallels to electrons systems and quark-gluon plasmas, quantized transport in mesoscopic geometries, magnetism and pairing in lattice systems with close links to high temperature superconductors, the detection of Majorana fermions and the robustness of topological edge currents, and the transition from few- to many-body physics. All these questions are fundamental to the field of physics, yet largely unresolved.

The discussions were very lively, partly due to the fact that the participants were all early in their career. Also, the conference benefitted tremendously from having researchers from condensed matter and high-energy physics. Several new collaborations were started during the three days, and it was in conclusion a very successful and interesting conference.

See slides and photos on the conference website

http://aias.au.dk/events/cold-atoms/

Contact

Jesper Levinsen, AIAS Fellow, at jfle@aias.au.dk or Communications officer Lena Bering at lber@aias.au.dk

Organizers

Jesper Levinsen, AIAS DTM Fellow, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in collaboration with
Georg Bruun, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, Denmark.