Archived Newsletters

March 2016 Newsletter

In This Issue

Introduction

Dear GFB members,

This newsletter reviews activities of the APS Topical Group on Few-body Systems and Multi-particle Dynamics (GFB) in 2015. Over the past few years, the Topical group has grown and expanded its reach. As of March 2016, the group had over 345 members. We continue to expand and support the few body physics committees.

2015 was a busy year. We organized, jointly with the Group on Precision Measurements and Fundamental Constants, a workshop at last year’s April meeting in Baltimore, MD. We had an unprecedented level of involvement in this year’s International Conference on Few-body Problems in Physics. For the first time, GFB sponsored sessions at DAMOP and will do it again this year. Finally, two APS fellowships were awarded to GFB members in 2015. You can read more about all these activities — and others too — in what follows.

Lastly, we are trying something new with the newsletter and putting it on an APS webpage. Let us know how you like it*.

Sincerely,

Chris Ticknor

*Please contact Ricardo Alarcon, the next GFB chair, with all comments.

Two APS Fellowships Awarded Through GFB

This year the APS awarded two fellowships through GFB. The two new fellows are: Shina Tan of Georgia Tech and Jose D’Incao of JILA/CU Boulder. Both Shina and Jose have worked mainly within the AMO community, and so they will be presented with their Fellowship certificates at the 2016 DAMOP meeting. In the spirit of our topical group, their work is finding applications in nuclear physics. For Shina, the “contact” he defined has recently been connected to short-range correlations in nuclei. Jose’s work on the connection between the Efimov effect and resonances in the four-boson problem is intimately tied, through few-body universality, to few-nucleon systems.

Shina Tan’s citation is “For the derivation of fundamental relations for ultracold atomic gases with two-body short-range interactions and the study of ultracold few-body systems.”

Representative publications are:

  • Shina Tan, Universal Energy Functional for Trapped Fermi Gases with Short Range Interactions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 145302 (2011);
  • Yusuke Nishida, D. T. Son, and Shina Tan, Universal Fermi Gas with Two- and Three-Body Resonances, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 090405 (2008);

Experimental verification of the Tan relations:

Jose D’Incao citation is ”For contributions to our understanding of fundamental low-energy few-body physics, including Efimov physics, and its application to ultracold atomic and molecular gases.”

GFB at APR15

This year there were two invited sessions at APR15 GFB.

The session was called: Search for New Physics with Atoms, Molecules and Nuclei.

For this well-attended session there were three invited speakers:

  • Dmitry Budker from Mainz University Tests of Fundamental Symmetries
  • Wick Haxton from LBL, Manifestations of Symmetry Violation in Nuclei
  • John Doyle from Harvard, New Upper Limit on the Electron's Electric Dipole Moment

This session was run in conjunction with Topical Group on Precision Measurement & Fundamental Constants and was part a workshop: Tests of Fundamental Symmetries. The workshop was co-sponsored by GFB and GPMC. For a list of speakers see the workshop website.

Additionally, there was:

Correlated Fermions in Nuclei and Ultra-Cold Atomic Gasses

The speakers and talks were:

  • Nir Barnea from Hebrew University, “The Nuclear Contact and the Photoabsorption Cross Section”
  • Misak Sargsian from Florida International University, “Possible Universal Properties of Correlated High Momentum Fermions”
  • Lawrence Weinstein from Old Dominion University, “Correlated Fermions from Ultra-Cold Atomic Gases to Nuclear Matter”
In addition to these sessions, there was a contributed session “Few-body systems”.

GFB Sponsored Sessions at DAMOP for the First Time

GFB sponsored two sessions at the annual meeting of APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) in Columbus Ohio.

There was a contributed session: Few-body Physics in Cold Atoms.

Additionally, there was an excellent and well attended invited session (in excess of 200 people): Few-body Experiments and Theory. The four invited talks were given by 2 experimentalists and 2 theorists. They were:

Interfering and Entangling Single Neutral Atoms
Cindy Regal from JILA, University of Colorado.

Efimov Physics in an Ultracold Bose-Fermi Mixture with Large Mass Imbalance
Matthias Weidemueller from University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Boson Droplets Without and With an Impurity: The large Two-body s-Wave Scattering Length Limit
D. Blume from Washington State University

Universal Bound States in Confined Geometries
Meera Parish from Monash University in Australia

Next year’s DAMOP conference is in Providence RI.

GFB at FB21

Few-Body 21 (FB21), the Twenty-first International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, was held from May 18 to May 22, 2015 in the West Loop of downtown Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was jointly organized by Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory.

Few-body physics now stretches from the domain of neV energies to investigations of hadron properties at GeV energies–and encompasses significant swaths of contemporary nuclear physics in between. The meetings in this series have marked our progress to this point, the first being held in London in 1959. FB21 presented progress on problems that can be understood in terms of a few effective degrees of freedom. This included experimental and theoretical investigations pertaining to atomic and molecular physics, the role of clustering in the structure and reactions of light nuclei, few-nucleon systems and their interactions, the physics of hadrons, and hypernuclei.

Over 240 participants from 29 countries around the world attended the conference. FB21 featured 31 invited plenary talks, 32 invited lead parallel session talks and 127 contributed talks, resulting in a total of 190 oral presentations. In addition, there were more than 30 poster presentations in a separate poster session on Tuesday afternoon. The week in Chicago provided a snapshot of our vigorous and diverse field.

The meeting was only possible because of generous sponsorship from Ohio University's Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, Argonne National Laboratory's Theory Group, Argonne National Laboratory's Physics Division, The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio University, The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University, The Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, Jefferson Laboratory, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. GFB sponsored a reception in conjunction with the Tuesday poster session.

Ohio University’s Office of Research also provided key funding to facilitate the publication of the conference proceedings, which will appear in the European Physical Journal’s Web of Conferences in 2016. Those proceedings — which many of you have done referee work for over the past few months! — reflect the impressive breadth and excellent quality of contributions to the meeting. That — combined with the strong presence of younger scientists in Chicago — augurs well for the next conference in this series, which will take place in Caen, France in July 2018.

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Opinions expressed represent the views of the individual authors and not the American Physical Society or author’s employers.