26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Session

AIP ATMOP: Ultracold Quantum Gases

ATMOP

8 Dec 2026, 16:30

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Conveners

AIP ATMOP: Ultracold Quantum Gases

• Odile Smits (University of Queensland)

48. Atom--atom correlations in Bose--Fermi gas collisions

Prof. Karen Kheruntsyan (The University of Queensland)

08/12/2026, 16:30

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

Collisions between ultracold quantum gases provide a fertile ground for generating nonclassical correlations, entanglement, and momentum-space analogues of optical quantum states using massive particles. Such phenomena have been studied extensively in bosonic systems, in particular in collisions of metastable $^4$He$^\ast$ Bose--Einstein condensates. These studies led to some of the...

139. Quantum droplets in a resonant Bose-Fermi mixture

Sam Foster (Monash University)

08/12/2026, 16:45

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

We study the canonical problem of a Fermi gas interacting with a weakly repulsive Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature. To explore the quantum phases across the full range of boson-fermion interactions, we construct a versatile variational ansatz that incorporates pair correlations and correctly captures the different polaron limits. Remarkably, we find that self-bound quantum droplets...

264. DFT made warm, excited, and ready for quantum computers

Tim Gould (Griffith University)

08/12/2026, 17:00

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

This talk will cover recent developments in "ensemblisation" - in which fundamental theory is used to extend formal and practical density functional theory (DFT) to excited states and finite temperatures. The talk will focus on key theory results, but will also discuss practical advances enabled therefrom that improve simulation of excited states and open quantum systems. It will introduce...

294. Faraday Waves in Viscous Superfluids

Tapio Simula

08/12/2026, 17:15

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

We theoretically consider periodically driven Bose-Einstein condensates whose scattering length is modulated sinusoidally. In experiments, such superfluids have been observed to develop Faraday waves [1] and pattern forming dynamics [2,3]. However, due to the absence of dissipative restoring forces, these systems rapidly transition to quantum turbulence. By introducing a phenomenological...

466. Experimental Creation of Novel Solitons Structures in Multicomponent Bose-Einstein Condensates

Zachary Kerr (The University of Queensland)

08/12/2026, 17:30

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

Solitons—self-reinforcing wave packets that propagate without dispersing—occupy a distinctive place in physics because they arise from a delicate balance between nonlinearity and dispersion, allowing them to behave like stable, particle-like excitations even as they carry topological or phase information through a medium. First identified in shallow water waves and later found in optical...

582. CHSH Bell Inequality Violation with Momentum-Entangled ultracold helium atoms

Sean Hodgman (The Australian National University)

08/12/2026, 17:45

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

The Bell test framework provides one of the clearest and most rigorous demonstrations of quantum nonlocality. While Bell non-locality tests have been extensively demonstrated with photons, experimental realisations with massive particles have been explored significantly less, due to the challenges with generating, manipulating, and independently measuring entangled matter-wave states. In this...