Submission Date

7-24-2015

Document Type

Paper

Department

Physics & Astronomy

Faculty Mentor

Thomas Carroll

Student Contributor

Jacob Bigelow

Second Student Contributor

Veronica Sanford

Comments

Presented during the 17th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 24, 2015 at Ursinus College.

Supported by a National Science Foundation grant (PHY-1205897).

Project Description

In our project we ran computations on a supercomputer to simulate experiments performed on highly excited atoms at μK temperatures. At μK temperatures the atoms are moving slowly so there are essentially no collisions of the atoms on the time scales at which we perform our experiments. In the absence of collisions the atoms exchange energy through long range dipole-dipole interactions. This exchange depends on the distances between and relative orientation of the atoms. The angular dependence between two atoms has recently been studied experimentally1 . We simulate experimentally accessible spatial arrangements to see if the effect of the angular dependence can be measured in the many atom case. We present results that show that the angular dependence has a measurable effect on the time evolution of the spatial distribution of the energy in the system.

1. arXiv:1504.00301[physics.atom-ph]

Open Access

Available to all.

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