8/2019
Congratulations to Roger Ding for successfully defending his PhD thesis "Spectroscopy of 87-Sr Rydberg Atoms and Molecules." He has now moved to Sandia National Laboratories.

8/2019
Congratulations to Jim Aman for successfully defending his PhD thesis "Two-photon photoassociative spectroscopy of strontium-86." Jim is now the Chief Technology Officer at Topl.

8/2018
Congratulations to Thomas Langin for successfully defending his PhD thesis on the laser cooling of an ultracold neutral plasma, and beginning a postdoc in the DeMille group at Yale.

7/2017
Congratulations to Francisco Camargo for successfully defending his PhD thesis titled "Rydberg Molecules and Polarons in Ultracold Strontium Gases" and beginning work at AMD.

7/2015
Congratulations to Brian DeSalvo for successfully defending his PhD thesis titled "Ultralong-Range Molecules and Rydberg Blockade in Ultracold 84-Sr" and receiving a Grainger Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Chicago to work with Prof. Cheng Chin.

4/2015
Congratulations to Patrick McQuillen for successfully defending his PhD thesis titled "High Resolution Measurement and Modeling of Ion Dynamics in an Ultracold Neutral Plasma."

11/2013
Congratulations to Ying Huang for earning her Master's Degree for "A New Optical Trap System for Ultracold Strontium" and Mi Yan for completing his PhD "Optical Feshbach Resonances and Coherent Photoassociation in a Strontium BEC". Mi will start a job with CGG Veritas.

10/2013
"Rabi Oscillations between Atomic and Molecular Condensates Driven with Coherent One-Color Photoassociation" is published in Physical Review Letters and received the Editor's Suggestion distinction. 2013 has been a fantastic year for publications, with papers in Physical Review Letters (3), Physical Review A (2), Physics of Plasmas, Nature Protocals, Scientific Reports, and Tissue Engineering Part C. Good job everyone.

8/2013
Kelli Humbird, Physics and Nuclear Engineering major from Texas A&M, completes her summer RQI REU. Noah Morrison, Computer Science major from the University of Texas at Austin, completes his summer internship. Good luck Kelli and Noah!

6/2013
Patrick MCQuillen gives and invited talk at the APS Division of Atomic, Moleculer, and Optical Physics Meeting on "The pursuit of more strongly coupled plasmas using the Rydberg blockade ."

2/2013
The Ultracold Atoms and Plasmas group welcomes new graduate students James Aman and Thomas Langin.

12/2012
The use of magnetic levitation to create accurate laboratory models of human lung tissue was published in "Tissue Engineering Part C: Methods" and was featured in the in the Rice News.

11/2012
Prof. Killian gave a 5 minute talk on the "The Pursuit for Total Control in Atomic Physics" in the Rice "Scientia: The Power of Ideas" series.

11/2012
The ultracold plasma group published the first direct measurement of collision rates in strongly coupled plasmas, which is an open problem important for modeling stellar interiors and inertial confinement fustion plasmas, "Velocity Relaxation in a Strongly Coupled Plasma."

10/2012
Prof. Killian gave a talk at the "5th International Workshop on Ultracold Group II Atoms" in tokyo title "Controlling Condensate Collapse and Expansion in 88Sr with an Optical Feshbach Resonance."

9/2012
Prof. Killian gave a talk at the "14th International Conference on the Physics of Non-Ideal Plasmas" in Rostock, Germany title "Beyond Landau-Spitzer: Collisions in Strongly Coupled Ultracold Plasmas."

4/2012
Patrick McQuillen and Brian DeSalvo successfully defended their master's degree projects and earn PhD candidacy.

3/2012
Prof. Killian gave a talk at the German Physical Society Meeting in Stuttgart on "Equilibration of Strongly Coupled Ultracold Plasmas."

3/2012
The Ultracold Atoms and Plasmas group welcomes Trevor Strickler, who will start a post-doctoral research position here in April.

11/2011
Prof. Killian gave a talk at the APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting on "Ion Acoustic Waves in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas ."

8/2011
Jose Castro successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Collective effects in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas." Congratulations Dr. Castro!

3/2011
Prof. Killian gave a talk at the APS March Meeting on "Degenerate Fermi Gas of Strontium-87."

3/2011
The Killian lab moved to Brockman Hall, Rice's new physics building. Click here to view the video "Moving Giant Laser Table Intact", a high point of the move.

9/2010
We developed a new technique to sculpt the density of ultracold neutral plasmas and used it to excite ion acoustic waves. Phys. Rev. Lett., "Ion Acoustic Waves in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas".

7/2010
We created a quantum degenerate Fermi gas of strontium-87! Phys. Rev. Lett., "Degenerate Fermi Gas of 87-Sr"

5/2010
Prof. Killian gives a talk at the APS DAMOP Meeting on "Quantum Degenerate Gases of Atomic Strontium."

5/2010
BEC of strontium-88! Phys. Rev. Lett., Bose-Einstein condensation of 88-Sr through sympathetic cooling with 87-Sr

3/2010
Prof. Killian co-authors an article on ultracold neutral plasmas in Physics Today.

11/2009
Big results from the Killian group! We achieved BEC of strontium-84 nearly simultaneously with the Austrian group. See a review of the achievement in Physics and Phys. Rev. Lett., "Bose-Einstein Condensation of 84-Sr".

09/2009
At long last, an update. There are new group members (Brian and Patrick), newly earned master's degree holders (Dan and Jose), and some newer publications. Oh yeah, and certain professor types (Tom) are now parents.

06/28/2008
The group went blueberry picking again this summer.

05/10/2008
Sarah, Clayton, and Sampad all returned to Rice for the graduation and hooding ceremonies. Congratulations to these fine doctors.

03/22/2008
Welcome to our newest group member, Mi Yan!

01/24/2008
The Rice alumni magazine, Sallyport, profiled the ultracold plasmas experiment in its fall 2007 issue. Be sure to watch the video on the website!

01/14/2008
All four of our recently graduated lab members landed on their feet in interesting and challenging jobs:

• Clayton is at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD on an NRC fellowship.
• Sarah has joined the faculty on a teaching fellowship here at Rice.
• Sampad is doing analysis for an exploratory oil firm in Houston.
• Priya is straddling the divide between R&D and sales for New Focus in San Jose, CA.

10/01/2007
Clayton successfully defended his doctoral thesis. Congratulations!

08/10/2007
A flurry of activity this week resulted in the successful doctoral defenses of Sampad and Sarah. Congratulations to them both! Pictures here.

05/10/2007
Tom and the ultracold plasma crew are featured in Rice News.

05/07/2007
Andrew is graduating. His senior thesis is titled "Photoassociative Spectroscopy of Strontium Along the 1S0-3P1 Transition using a Littman/Metcalf Laser". Congratulations!

05/04/2007
Science published a review article of ultracold plasmas written by Tom!

04/17/2007
Priya successfully defended her PhD thesis titled Expansion and Electron Temperature Evolution in an Ultracold Neutral Plasma ! Congratulations! -- Pictures from Priya's final days --

02/28/2007
Jose and Tom will attend the Atomic Processes in Plasmas conference in Gaithersburg, MD from March 19th to the 22nd. Tom will present a talk titled, "Equilibration in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas", and Jose will present a poster titled, "Ion Temperature and Expansion Velocity Measurements Through Fluorescence Imaging in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas".

02/27/2007
Clayton attended the Annual Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and Black Physics Students in Boston from February 21st to the 25th.

Tom presented a talk titled, "Pushing the Envelope of Plasma Physics: Ultracold Neutral Plasmas" for The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas last year, a video of which has been posted online.

11/01/2006
Hong Gao, our new post-doc, began working in the lab a couple of weeks ago. Welcome Gao!

05/23/2006
Nature News and Views Plasma physics: Cool vibes written by Tom.

Most of the lab group just returned from DAMOP.

Sampad, Pascal, and Tom presented talks titled, respectively:
"Gaussian expansion and electron temperature determination in ultracold Sr plasma"
"Saturation effects in photoassociation spectroscopy of 86-Sr"
"Expansion dynamics of ultracold neutral plasmas"

Clayton, Sarah, and Natali presented posters with the following titles, respectively:
"Study of ultracold strontium plasma"
"An in-house thermal evaporation system for anti-reflection coating of laser diodes" (done in conjunction with Duong from the Hulet group)
"All-optical experiments with ultracold strontium"

Priya is gone at CLEO this week.

02/17/2006
Welcome to our newest group members, Jose Castro and Dan Stark. We look forward to working more with them. Scott McIsaac and Aditya Shashi, Rice undergraduates, have also been working in the lab.

The Killian group is a founding member of the Rice Laboratory for Ultracold Physics (RLUP).

11/27/2005
Our paper on determining the scattering lengths of strontium was published. You can find it here:

P. G. Mickelson, Y. N. Martinez, A. D. Saenz, S. B. Nagel, Y. C. Chen, T. C. Killian, P. Pellegrini, and R. Cote, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 223002 (2005).

07/19/2005
The Killian Lab graduated its first student: Aaron Saenz has completed his M.S. in physics and is moving to New York. Congratulations, Aaron! -- Pictures from Aaron's final week --

05/16/2005
Welcome to our new undergraduate students:
- Kris Zarling and Andrew Traverso, both Rice students.
- Josh Dorr from the Colorado School of Mines.
- Meaghan Paceley from Caltech.
We had a sad leave-taking, as Ying-Cheng left in December for a new job in Taiwan where he seems to be doing very well so far.

12/03/2004
Web page is updated to include information on the post-doctoral position. The research page was updated as well.

11/08/2004
A post-doctoral research position in our group is available. If you are interested, please contact Tom for more information. Also, see the post-doc position.

10/05/2004
Our latest paper, Photoassociative spectroscopy at long range in ultracold strontium, is posted to the pre-print server.

09/22/2004
Posted copies of Sarah's thesis and Priya's thesis.

06/30/2004
A group outing saw the Killian Lab blueberry picking.

06/04/2004
The group traveled to DAMOP in Tucson, Arizona. Clayton, Sampad, Priya, Ying-Cheng, and Tom all presented talks on the optical imaging of ultracold plasmas, while Sarah talked about narrow-line cooling of strontium. Natali and Pascal presented posters related to narrow-line cooling.

05/01/2004
Sarah Nagel also successfully defended her master's thesis. It was titled "A Narrow Linewidth Diode Laser System for Strontium Laser Cooling Applications". A mouthful of a title, but congratulations nevertheless!

04/15/2004
It's Tax Day, and also Tom's Birthday. Happy Birthday, Tom!
Priya Gupta has successfully defended her master's thesis titled , "Pulsed Dye Laser". Good work!

04/06/2004
Using Absorption Imaging to Study Ion Dynamics in an Ultracold Plasma
Clayton Simien has successfully defended his master's thesis titled, "422 nm Laser". Congratulations.

03/15/04
Aaron Saenz is our newest group member.
Added pictures of our experiment to the "Laboratory" page.
Our pre-print (see below) was approved for publication on the 17th of February.

10/15/03
Meet our newest family member.

10/03/03
Our newest paper, on the optical imaging of plasmas, is posted to the pre-print server.

07/02/03
This web page is updated to include new group members. Welcome Ying-Cheng, Natali, Pascal, and Temple.