Constructing a Laser Diode System for Cooling and Trapping Fermionic Lithium
This summer I worked on the construction of a laser diode system for cooling and trapping fermionic Lithium (6Li) in a magneto-optical trap. Once we can trap 6Li atoms in the magneto-optical trap, we will be able to cool them further via sympathetic evaporative cooling with bosonic Li (7Li) to produce a coexistent Bose-Einstein condensate and degenerate Fermi gas.
Chaotic Behavior of Mobile Robots
This talk will cover some of the research I did at the Santa Fe Institute this summer. I studied chaos using mobile robots as a model system, and showed that certain wall following algorithms behave like nonlinear oscillators, driven to chaos by perturbations from the environment. I will also talk about methods of characterizing chaotic systems, including the Lyapunov exponent, bifurcation diagram, and poincare map.