Live Lab Tour with Isabel Rabey @ the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics

Isabel Rabey was born in Norwich, in the UK. She completed her Master's degree at the Imperial College London in 2013, where she also did her Ph.D. in the Centre of Cold Matter, under the supervision of Prof. Ed Hinds and Prof. Mike Tarbutt. In 2018, she moved to the MPQ for her first postdoc position. Here she works on the cryofuge experiment in the Quantum Dynamics division which is led by Prof. Gerhard Rempe. As things get colder, they get more and more interesting, but getting to these cold temperatures in the first place can be challenging. Tony showed you during his Live LabTour the complicated equipment and the expertise you need to cool and control atoms. But when you have a molecule, things are even more complicated. These particles have many more degrees of freedom, which makes them very interesting to study, but as a result, they can also be much trickier to control. Here at the MPQ, Isabel and her colleagues have developed “the Cryofuge”, a unique setup which allows them to cool, slow, and trap polyatomic molecules. That is something that has only been achieved here at the MPQ. Imagine! When the molecules are held in the trap, they can probe their interactions, and for the first time study the collisional properties of molecules at low temperatures. Ultracold Polar Molecules https://www.quantum-munich.de/12210/U...