Niels Kjaergaard, recently appointed to the faculty of the Physics Department, has been awarded a 2011 Marsden grant for the project: “Littlest Hadron Collider: A laser based accelerator for ultra-cold atoms”. This grant will provide a total of $735,000 over three years and will allow Niels and his collaborators to carry out a detailed experimental study of the scattering of atoms travelling at very low speeds. The Marsden grants are exceptionally competitive, with only about 5 percent of proposals in Physical Science being funded this year.
Niels has a strong collaboration with Assoc.Prof. Blair Blakie within the Department, and the project will also involve Dr Eite Tiesinga at the Joint Quantum Institute and the University of Maryland, who is an expert on atomic collision physics.
More information about this research programme may be found on Niels’ research group webpage at
https://sites.google.com/site/physotago/
and on Blair’s research group webpage at