Welcome to website of the Cretan Matter Waves (CMW), the Bose-Einstein Condensation and MatterWaves Group of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Lasers (IESL) on Crete, Greece.
Mission Statement
- To explore the unprecedented potential of matter-wave interferometry
- To look at (de)coherence in increasingly complex quantum systems.
BEC 1: Our long-term aim is to construct a coherently guided matter-wave interferometer. We have recently demonstrated the first guiding of matterwaves over macroscopic distances without affecting the internal coherence of the Bose-Einstein Condensates (BEC), i.e. to guide them without any heating or atom-loss. The interferometer will consist of a novel magnetic ring-shaped waveguide based on time-averaged adiabatic potentials (TAAP).
BEC 2: Our second experiment, which looks at BEC at higher atom numbers. We recently demonstrated a novel atom laser, which has a record flux of 4 x 10^7 atom/s. We also made the coldest thermal source to date (200nK). We are now using our novel QUIC trap plus adiabatic potentials to look at phase properties of large elongated condensates. In the future we plan to study the kinetics of the condensation process itself. We also plan to study the rise of coherence in phase-fluctuating condensates.
Space Optics: We are developing a novel fibre distribution board for complex optical space missions like STE-QUEST.