Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My current research focuses on investigating ultra-cold, trapped gases of bosons (particles with integer spin) and fermions (particles with half-odd integer spin) when they are confined to effectively two-dimensions (2D). This can be accomplished by making the confinement in one direction very strong so that the system has only two degrees of freedom. At these nano-Kelvin temperatures, the laws of quantum mechanics must be applied in order to describe the system. These so-called 2D trapped quantum gases turn out to behave in ways very different from their uniform 2D counterparts. For example, while a uniform 2D gas of non-interacting bosons cannot condense to a Bose-Einstein Condensate (i.e., where all particles are in the same quantum ground state) at finite temperature, a trapped 2D gas can undergo a transition to the BEC state. In experiments, the particles are in fact interacting, which introduces further complexity into the problem, so that one is dealing with a fully quantum mechanical many-body problem. A full solution to this problem is challenging. Indeed, depending on the Fermi or Bose nature of the particles, very different physics will be manifested. My research objective is to understand the physics of these 2D trapped quantum systems using both traditional pen and paper and computational techniques. I am also moving into a new field of research which involves a theoretical understanding of new organic compounds and semiconducting polymers. These materials are attracting attention because they should provide low-cost and highly flexible alternatives to standard micro- and opto-electronic devices, such as diodes, transistors, LEDs, lasers and sensors, which are traditionally based on inorganic semiconductor technology. Our current focus is a theoretical understanding of charge transport in pentacene-based organic thin-film transistors, particularly the ways in which the device performance can be optimized.