From 14 February until 5 March 2022, Arthur Christianen, a PhD student in the groups of Richard Schmidt and Ignacio Cirac at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics is visiting the Department of Physics and Astronomy and CCQ. Arthur is broadly interested in the few-and many-body physics of ultracold gases of atoms and molecules and aim to achieve a bottom-up theoretical understanding of the quantum dynamics, starting from the first principles of cold collisions. His main current research direction is the Bose polaron, an impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate, and in particular the role of the Efimov effect in its dynamics. In the theoretical description he uses a Gaussian state variational method, drawing inspiration from quantum chemistry. Previously, Arthur has worked on “sticky collisions” of ultracold bialkali diatoms and has calculated interaction potentials between the molecules, estimated the collisional sticking time, and predicted a photoinduced collisional loss mechanism. These theoretical predictions have recently been verified in experiments.

A warm welcome to Arthur,