Research Interests

Our group investigates phenomena in diverse areas of atomic and molecular physics (and sometimes plasma physics!) using theoretical and computational techniques. Research by myself and immediate collaborators has "concentrated" in five areas: collective photon-atom interaction, antimatter, levitated nanoparticles, perturbed Rydberg atoms, and single atom physics. In our studies, we develop new theoretical formulations of basic atomic processes while also attempting to push our treatments to the point where we can compare our calculations to past experimental results or provide predictions for experiments that could be performed in the near future.

This drive to obtain specific, quantitative results is facilitated by our development of computer programs for use on workstations, CRAY supercomputers, and massively parallel machines. One of the strengths of our group is collaboration with experimental programs and one of our hopes is to form a collaboration with a new experimental group each year. We are part of the ALPHA collaboration: the first group to trap the antimatter version of the hydrogen atom and the only group to quantitatively measure its properties.

The current group is four graduate students (Akilesh Venkatesh, Deepak Suresh, AbdAlGhaffar Amer, and Aanal Shah); interested graduate students should see Graduate Research and inquire about doing a 590 to try out research in the group. Many undergraduates have completed research projects in the group, see Undergraduate Research; typically, undergraduate research starts at the beginning of the Fall semester so there is enough time to learn how to use various computational tools and complete research project that can be published in a peer reviewed journal.

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Collective Photon-Atom Interaction

Antimatter

Levitated Nanoparticles

Perturbed Rydberg Atoms

Single Atom Physics