Dana Anderson

  • Photo of Dana Anderson
    Enabling more people to get hands-on experience with quantum atomics through access to Albert will accelerate the learning curve of a new generation of quantum pioneers.
  • Artist rendering of the International Space Station.
    JILA鈥檚 favorite degenerate, the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), has a new home: the International Space Station. This new acheivement is "multi-mega-awesome," according to JILA Fellow聽Eric Cornell. BECs became a staple for measuring quantum phenomenon when they were experimentally realized in 1995 by JILA Fellows Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder, and by Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT.
  • An optical lattice experiment learned to be an interferometer through shaking
  • Tens of thousands ultracold atoms (blue) sit within an optical lattice (red) like eggs in a laser carton. By shaking the optical lattice back and forth, the Anderson Group at JILA was able to split the atoms (half moved left, half moved right) and then recombine them, thus interfering their momentum. This interferometer is capable of measuring both magnitude and direction of applied forces.
    鈥淲ell, this isn鈥檛 going to work.鈥 That was recent JILA graduate Carrie Weidner鈥檚 first thought when her advisor, JILA Fellow Dana Anderson, proposed the difficult experiment: to build an interferometer unlike any before 鈥 an interferometer of shaking atoms. But the grit paid off, as this compact and robust interferometer聽outperforms all others in filtering and distinguishing signal direction. While the designs of most atom interferometers are symmetric and elegant, Weidner says the shaken-lattice experiment proposed by Anderson 鈥渋s more like broken eggs.鈥
  • Compact and transportable optical lattices are coming soon to a laboratory near you, thanks to the Anderson group and its spin-off company, ColdQuanta. A new robust on-chip lattice system (which measures 2.3 cm on a side) is now commercially
  • Photograph of the on-chip optical lattice system.
    Compact and transportable optical lattices are coming soon to a laboratory near you, thanks to the Anderson group and its spin-off company, ColdQuanta. A new robust on-chip lattice system (which measures 2.3 cm on a side) is now commercially available. The chip comes with a miniature vacuum system, lasers, and mounting platform.
  • Photo of Dana Anderson
    Fellow Dana Anderson has won a CO-LABS 2014 Governor鈥檚 Award for High-Impact Research in Foundational Technology. Anderson鈥檚 work in the commercialization of cold-atom technology also received an Honorable Mention for the development of a strong public/private partnership.
  • The vacuum side of an atom microchip.
    The Dana Z. Anderson group has developed a microchip-based system that not only rapidly produces Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), but also is compact and transportable. The complete working system easily fits on an average-sized rolling cart. This technology opens the door to using ultracold matter in gravity sensors, atomic clocks, inertial sensors, as well as in electric- and magnetic-field sensing. Research associate Dan Farkas demonstrated the new system at the American Physical Society鈥檚 March 2010 meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, March 15鈥19.
  • Statistical processing techniques make it possible to extract features of a cold atom cloud from images taken of a BEC experiment.
    The Anderson and Cornell groups have adapted two statistical techniques used in astronomical data processing to the analysis of images of ultracold atom gases. Image analysis is necessary for obtaining quantitative information about the behavior of an ultracold gas under different experimental conditions. Until now, the preferred method has been to find a shape (such as a Gaussian) that looks like the results and write an image-fitting routine to probe a series of photographs. The drawback is that information extracted this way will be biased by the model chosen.
  • Symbol of electronic transistor
    JILA Fellow Dana Z. Anderson, JILA visiting scientist Alex Zozulya, and a colleague from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute postulate that the ultracold coherent atoms in a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) could be configured to act like electrons in a transistor. An 鈥渁tom transistor鈥 would exhibit absolute and differential gain, as well as allow for the movement of single atoms to be resolved in a precision scientific measurement.
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