2017
New method uses heat flow to levitate variety of objects
February 15, 2017
Undergraduates in Chin group lead breakthrough work.
Third-year Frankie Fung and fourth-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects—ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds—between a warm plate and a cold plate in a vacuum chamber.
“They made lots of intriguing observations that blew my mind,” said Cheng Chin, professor of physics, whose ultracold lab in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science was home to the experiments.
Publication
New SPIFF method improves accuracy of imaging systems
February 4, 2017
Collaborative work by the Dinner, Rice, and Scherer groups
The newly developed SPIFF (single-pixel interior filling function) method provides a way to detect and correct systematic errors in data and image analysis used in many areas of science and engineering.
“Anyone working with imaging data on tiny objects — or objects that appear tiny — who wants to determine and track their positions in time and space will benefit from the single-pixel interior filling function method,” said co-principal investigator Norbert Scherer.
Publication
2016
Chin group confirms theory describing principles of phase transitions
November 3, 2016
Ultracold atoms unveil a universal symmetry of systems crossing continuous phase transitions.
Publication
New Device Steps Toward Isolating Single Electrons for Quantum Computing
May 19, 2016
The Schuster Group has integrated trapped electrons with superconducting quantum circuits.
“A key aspect of this experiment is that we have integrated trapped electrons with more well-developed superconducting quantum circuits,” said graduate student Ge Yang, lead author of the Physical Review X paper that reported the group’s findings. The team captured the electrons by coaxing them to float above the surface of liquid helium at extremely low temperatures.
Publication