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Professor

Photo of Professor Niels Kjaergaard.

Locations
Lab 319b
Room 316
Phone numbers
7786 (Office)
64 3 479 7786 (Office Direct Dial)
7786 (Lab)
Email
niels.kjaergaard@otago.ac.nz
Research Group
https://kjaergaardlab.physics.otago.ac.nz/

Download the vCard for Professor Niels Kjaergaard

Biography


Niels Kjærgaard received his PhD in 2001 from Aarhus University, Denmark.

We are presently developing a novel collider to perform high precision atomic physics measurements. This research is supported for three years by the Marsden Fund, selected in the 2011 round as one of 5 projects funded across Physics, Chemistry, and Biochemistry in New Zealand. As the high-energy colliders used in particle physics like the LHC at CERN, our apparatus will smash together bunches of atoms and analyze the spatial distribution of the scattered debris. However, our collider will operate in a regime of extreme contrast: it will use samples of atoms at nano-Kelvin temperatures accelerated to pedestrian velocities of up to a meter per second. The full execution of this collider utilizes a collaboration with theorists who have developed state-of-the-art calculations to extract key information from the experimental scattering patterns.

Find out more about my research.

Current teaching

PHSI 191 Biological Physics
PHSI 132 Fundamentals of Modern Physics
PHSI 282 Experimental Physics I
PHSI 331 Quantum, Atomic and Particle Physics

Publications

Deb, A. B., & Kjærgaard, N. (2021). Observation of Pauli blocking in light scattering from quantum degenerate fermions. Science, 374(6570), 972-975. doi: 10.1126/science.abh3470

Thomas, R., Chilcott, M., Tiesinga, E., Deb, A. B., & Kjærgaard, N. (2018). Observation of bound state self-interaction in a nano-eV atom collider. Nature Communications, 9, 4895. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07375-8

Horvath, M. S. J., Thomas, R., Tiesinga, E., Deb, A. B., & Kjærgaard, N. (2017). Above-threshold scattering about a Feshbach resonance for ultracold atoms in an optical collider. Nature Communications, 8, 452. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00458-y

Thomas, R., Roberts, K. O., Tiesinga, E., Wade, A. C. J., Blakie, P. B., Deb, A. B., & Kjærgaard, N. (2016). Multiple scattering dynamics of fermions at an isolated p-wave resonance. Nature Communications, 7, 12069. doi: 10.1038/ncomms12069

Appel, J., Windpassinger, P. J., Oblak, D., Hoff, U. B., Kjærgaard, N., & Polzik, E. S. (2009). Mesoscopic atomic entanglement for precision measurements beyond the standard quantum limit. PNAS, 106(27), 10960-10965. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0901550106

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