MSE SEMINAR
March 18, 2011
113 McBryde Hall
3:30 – 4:30
Refreshments at 3:00
Dr. Leslie Baksmaty
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rice University
Houston, TX
“Unitary Superfluidity of Polarized Fermionic Gases in
Highly Elongated Traps”
ABSTRACT
Recent groundbreaking experiments on resonantly interacting fermionic superfluids encountered
qualitative and quantitative discrepancies which seem to be a function of the confining geometry. Despite
long familiarity with BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer) superfluids in a wide range of physical systems such
as nuclear matter, QCD, Astrophysics and Condensed Matter, these observations have defied theoretical
explanation. Mindful of quantum rigidity and motivated by this impasse, we study the solution space for 3dimensional fully self-consistent mean field formulation. Relying on numerical algorithms specifically
developed for this purpose, we study realistic systems with up to 10 5 atoms. We observe that the system
exhibits unexpected metastability and that the observed state is a strong function of the experimental
preparation. This is has recently been confirmed by experiments.
BIO
Dr. Leslie Baksmaty was born in Ghana and he attended primary and high school there. After A-levels in
Ghana, he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester. While there he worked with Nick
Bigelow, a professor of optics and atomic physics. He did his Ph.D. thesis on dynamics of vortex lattices in
ultra-cold atomic gases. He did a 2 year post-doc at Georgia tech where he worked with Uzi Landman,
winner of the APS Raman prize for computational physics and a pioneer of computational physics and
chemistry. He has been a post-doc at Rice University for 3 years. He is a part of the DARPA OLE program
which seeks to simulate quantum properties of real materials using ultra-cold atomic systems. Within this
effort his focus is on the fate of polarized strongly interacting s-wave superconducting. He is trying to
produce the phase diagram within the cross-over from 1 to 3 dimensions.