Prof. Nir Davidson
- The Peter and Carola Kleeman Professorial Chair of Optical Sciences
- Telephone
- 972-8-9342034
- FAX
- 972-8-9344109
- Postal address
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
- Electronic mail
- nir.davidson@weizmann.ac.il
Lab Profile
The main effort of my group is in the field of ultra-cold
atoms (at temperatures of nano Kelvin above absolute zero) and Bose-Einstein
condensation (BEC). One major effort is to study the motion of ultra-cold atoms,
confined in dark optical traps shaped as optical billiards, and to study the
interplay between their dynamics and spectrum. We showed that by combining the
dark trapping approach which suppresses most of the perturbations to the trapped
atoms, and our demonstration of optical billiards, where the small remaining
perturbations are precisely controlled, yields extremely long atomic coherence
times. Our long term goal is to establish ultra cold atoms as a tool to study
the transition from classical to quantum nonlinear dynamics. Our recent
discovery that quantum states in chaotic systems are much more fragile to small
perturbations then similar states in regular systems is an important milestone
to achieve this goal.
Our second main effort is to study the spectrum, dynamics and decay of
excitations over Bose-Einstein condensates in dilute atomic gas – a newly formed
state with macroscopic quantum properties. We developed new spectroscopic and
interference tools to accurately characterize these excitations. We applied them
first under simple conditions where linear perturbation theory is suitable and
then studied the effects of strong driving nonlinearities, strong confinement
and reduced dimensionality, strong interactions, wave mixing and disorder, where
new theories and concepts must be introduced. Our experiments lead to better
understanding of interacting quantum degenerated systems that may then shed
light on poorly understood systems such as high temperature super conductors.
Additional activities involve several fields in unconventional optics: (1)
electromagnetic induced transparency, where we concentrate on slowing and
storing light beams with interesting spatial distribution such as
topologically-stable helical beams and generalized images, (2) increasing the
power and improving the beam quality of lasers by phase locking and coherent
combining of several lasers, and (3) developing new methods and elements for
high numerical aperture laser focusing and microscopy, and diffuse light
concentration at the thermodynamic limit, using new types of curved diffractive
and reflecting optical elements, and by exploiting vectorial effects of the
electromagnetic field which become important at large focusing angles.
Contact Information
Prof. Nir Davidson
- Telephone
- 972-8-9342034
- FAX
- 972-8-9344109
- Postal address
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
- Electronic mail
- General Information:
nir.davidson@weizmann.ac.il
Webmaster:
nir.bar-gill@weizmann.ac.il
