Professor Andrew Daley receives NSF CAREER Award

Professor Andrew Daley has received an NSF CAREER Award, which will support his research and related teaching initiatives over the next five years. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program recognizes junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

The award will support Prof. Daley's research on non-equilibrium dynamics in systems of cold atoms and molecules. Understanding the non-equilibrium dynamics of such microscopic many-particle systems is crucial to the description of very fundamental phenomena occurring in nature, including how a gas of particles reaches thermal equilibrium, and how moving conduction electrons in solids behave in quantum transport processes. Recent developments in experiments with ultracold gases of atoms and molecules have made it possible to explore such non-equilibrium dynamics in highly controllable systems, which can be manipulated and measured by well-understood processes in laser fields. Prof. Daley and his group will investigate how the unique properties of these systems can be used to gain insight into fundamental aspects of non-equilibrium dynamics, including transport processes and thermalization. They will also investigate means to measure the quantum mechanical entanglement in these experiments, which could be used both to gain further insight into the dynamics, and to demonstrate regimes where a quantum mechanical experiment realizes dynamics that go beyond what is computable with state-of-the-art numerical methods.

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