2016 CAP Congress / Congrès de l'ACP 2016

Calibration of a Larmor Clock for Tunneling Time Experiments

15 Jun 2016, 16:00

15m

SITE G0103 (University of Ottawa)

Oral (Student, Not in Competition) / Orale (Étudiant(e), pas dans la compétition) Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, Canada / Division de la physique atomique, moléculaire et photonique, Canada (DAMOPC-DPAMPC) W3-6 Cold and Trapped Atoms, Molecules and Ions (DAMOPC) / Atomes, molécules et ions froids et piégés (DPAMPC)

Speaker

Mr David Spierings (University of Toronto)

Description

How much time does it take for a particle to tunnel? This has been a controversial question for nearly a century because of the inability to make a direct measurement of time. One operational definition for the tunnelling time is the Larmor clock, in which the spin degree of freedom of a tunneling particle is used as a clock that ticks only inside the forbidden region due to the presence of a magnetic field localized to within the barrier. Here, we report the calibration of a Larmor clock to measure tunneling times. Our system is a 87 Rb Bose Einstein condensate in the F=2 ground state manifold, traversing an optical waveguide. We use the Zeeman sublevels (a spin-2 system) and Raman beams for the implementation of the Larmor clock. Experimental progress towards measuring the tunneling time and the challenges involved in this measurement will also be discussed.