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Colin Rylands

Postdoc

Postdoctoral ResearcherAlumni

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  • A computer generated graphic showing intersecting blue beams holding pink cigar shaped tubes that represent atoms levitated in the optical cavity by laser beams.

    Quantum Simulation Stars Light in the Role of Sound

    July 30, 2020

    To help overcome the challenges of working directly with phonons in physical materials, JQI Fellow Victor Galitski, JQI postdoctoral researcher Colin Rylands and their colleagues have cast photons in the role of phonons in a classic story of phonon-driven physics.

  • Red, purple and green light shine in the laboratory equipment used to create atomic gases for experiments.

    Quantum Gases Won’t Take the Heat

    April 27, 2020

    The quantum world blatantly defies intuitions that we’ve developed while living among relatively large things, like cars, pennies and dust motes. The quantum behavior of dynamical localization bucks the assumption that a cold object will always steal heat from a warmer object. Until now, dynamical localization has only been observed for single quantum objects, which has prevented it from contributing to attempts to pin down where the changeover occurs. JQI researchers and colleagues have investigated mathematical models to see if dynamical localization can still arise when many quantum particles interact. To reveal the physics, they had to craft models to account for various temperatures, interaction strengths and lengths of times. The team’s results, published in Physical Review Letters, suggest that dynamical localization can occur even when strong interactions are part of the picture.