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

Session

AIP ATMOP: Quantum Matter (Cold atoms, Solid State)

ATMOP

9 Dec 2026, 11:00

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Conveners

AIP ATMOP: Quantum Matter (Cold atoms, Solid State)

• Joshua Machacek (Research School of Physics, Australian National University)

80. Quantum droplets of light in semiconductor microcavities

Matteo Caldara (Monash University)

09/12/2026, 11:00

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Invited talk

Quantum droplets are self-bound low-density configurations which may appear in ultracold gases when the attractive mean-field energy is balanced by the repulsive correction stemming from quantum fluctuations. Since their first predictions and experimental observations in dilute bosonic mixtures, the study of quantum droplets in cold-atomic settings has recently become a very active research...

736. When does a Fermi puddle become a Fermi sea?

Emma Laird (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)

09/12/2026, 11:30

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

How many grains are there in a heap of sand? A lone grain is far from enough, and adding a second or third makes little difference, yet beyond some vague threshold we instinctively call the collection of grains a "heap". The same question can be posed in the quantum realm: How many particles are needed to form a many-body quantum system?

This question is now experimentally accessible in...

63. Repulsive polaron quasiparticles in the strongly correlated regime

Prof. Meera Parish (Monash University)

09/12/2026, 11:45

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

Mobile impurities interacting with a quantum medium form quasiparticles known as polarons, a central concept in many-body physics. While the quantum impurity problem has been extensively studied with ultracold atomic gases, repulsive polarons in the strongly correlated regime have remained elusive. Typically, the impurity atoms bind into molecules or rapidly decay into deeper-lying states...

242. Diode-integrated silicon colour centres

Daniel Higginbottom (Simon Fraser University)

09/12/2026, 12:00

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

Colour centres in silicon are an emerging platform for quantum information technologies. They can emit into low-loss optical telecommunication bands and leverage advanced silicon nanofabrication for photonics and microelectronics. Of these, the silicon T centre, emitting in the O-band, is the most advanced. We integrate single T centres into optical nanocavities with lateral diodes to realize...

697. Feedback control of ultra-cold quantum gases

Kaiwen Zhu (The Australian National University)

09/12/2026, 12:15

AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Contributed Oral

We investigate the feasibility of measurement and feedback (MF) control protocols as a means to produce large-scale Bose-Einstein condensates of ultra-cold atomic gases using a recently developed phase-space approach [1] to capture unconditional dynamics of the full quantum-field under measurement and feedback. For experimentally accessible regimes in quasi-two-dimensional geometries, our...