Ultracold Gases: The Big Picture and the Details

Ultracold quantum gases of atoms are model systems that provide access to strongly correlated many-body physics and as well as to intriguing few-body physics phenomena. While one can investigate separately either the macroscopic behavior of the ensemble or the microscopic interactions of the constituents, the opportunity exists with ultracold atoms to examine the role of few-body physics in a many-body system. It is particularly interesting to explore the behavior of quantum gases with infinitely strong interactions (the so-called unitary gas). I will discuss a recent experiment where we took a Bose-Einstein condensate to this regime of strong interactions and looked at both few-body physics and many-body behavior in this system.​