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Are you interested in doing an internship or your master thesis project with us? LENS Internship Scholarships – 2026 Edition is open! 10 scholarships of 3000€ are available to support students from EU Universities who intend to conduct a 6-month master's thesis internship at LENS between April 2026 and December 2026. In order to encourage gender balance, preference will be given to candidates belonging to the underrepresented gender. Candidates must submit their application within March 2, 2026, at 5:00 PM CET You can find all the details of the call here
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LAST NEWS
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We’re happy to announce that LENS has finally joined Instagram. Alongside the QuantumGases account, you can now follow the official LENS account to stay updated on research highlights, events, and news from our community. |
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Supersolids are often described using a two-fluid model, in which a superfluid component coexists with a crystalline component that behaves classically. There is a direct analogy with a standard superfluid at finite temperature, where a classical thermal fraction complements the superfluid part. However, in a supersolid all atoms share the same many-body wavefunction. How, then, can they divide into two opposing fluids? In a recent publication, we theoretically show how a single-fluid model can account for the rotational properties of a supersolid, in which a spatially varying phase is responsible for the reduced superfluid response. Our theory makes it possible to design experimental protocols to rotate annular supersolids and to excite partially quantized supercurrents, in which each atom carries less than ℏ of angular momentum. N. Preti et al. |
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We wish you relaxing holidays and a fantastic New Year! We created this Christmas card with our new homogeneous unitary Fermi gas in tailored optical potentials. The gas is trapped in a 3D box potential created by two DMDs shining repulsive light both in the vertical and in the horizontal directions. Each frame consist in a single-shot image of the unitary gas with sculpted optical potential with the vertical DMD, imaged with our high-resolution microscope objective. We divide each frame into 16 or 20 segments to exploit the full resolution of the optical setup to accurately reproduce the videos on our atomic display. Feliz Navidad! Buon Natale! |
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When a superconductive Josephson junction is driven by an oscillating current, it develops a series of evenly spaced voltage plateaus known as Shapiro steps, like climbing a quantum staircase. As the height of each step is directly determined by the frequency of the applied current, the Shapiro steps provide the definition of the voltage standard. In this work, we report the observation of Shapiro steps in periodically driven Josephson junctions of strongly interacting Fermi superfluids of ultracold atoms. Similarly to the superconducting case, we observe quantized plateaus in the current–potential characteristics, which plays the role of the voltage in neutral atomic Josephon junctions. By measuring the junction relative phase, we also directly probe the current–phase relationship, showing that Shapiro steps originate from the synchronization of the junction relative phase with the applied drive. In the n-th Shapiro steps the junction phase undergoes to n phase slips event, which we directly visualize as the emission of n vortex-antivortex pairs. G. Del Pace et al.
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