Chinese international linkage grant awarded to CAOUS researcher

A prestigious international linkage grant has been awarded to a CAOUS researcher, Assoc. Prof. Hui Hu, in the 2012 round.

This two-year linkage grant, under the scheme of Overseas, Hong Kong & Macao Scholars Collaborated Researching Fund by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Chinese equivalent of ARC), will provide a total of A$30,000 to carry out the collaboration with Professors Su Yi and Changpu Sun at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Beijing. Grant details are listed below:

NSFC-China 11228410
Hui Hu, Su Yi, and Changpu Sun,
Thermodynamics and dynamics of ultracold dipolar Fermi gases
Funding: $30,000 (RMB Yuan 200,000) over two years

Project abstract
This project will investigate the fundamental and novel properties of strongly-interacting ultracold diploar Fermi gases, using ultracold fermionic polar molecules as a candidate system. An ultracold gas of polar molecules is a new frontier of ultracold atoms. In contrast to ultracold atomic gases with isotropic s-wave contact interactions, polar molecules have a large electric dipole moment and therefore can have strong long-range anisotropic dipole-dipole interactions in a controllable electric field. This provides a novel strongly-interacting quantum many-body system that has potential applications in future technologies. In this project, we will consider fermionic gases of 40K-87Rb polar molecules, which have already been realized in laboratories in the near quantum degenerate regime, and investigate systematically their thermodynamic properties, including instability, phase diagram, superfluid phase transition temperature, equation of state, density distribution and momentum distribution etc., and dynamic properties, including dipole-dipole collision, vortex state, ballistic expansion, radio-frequency spectroscopy and dynamic structure factor etc., in the limit of strong dipole-dipole interactions. We will present theoretical predictions that can be readily testable in experiments. Though our research will focus on the most stable quasi-two-dimensional system of KRb polar molecules, we will also consider other possible three-dimensional systems to be realized in the near future and investigate the dimensionality effect due to the change in dimensions. We will explore potential applications of fermionic polar molecules in quantum information.