Ron Folman, the group leader, has done his MSc and PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science and CERN, and then his post doc with Anton Zeilinger and Joerg Scmiedmayer in Innsbruck. Ron was one of the first to develop the atom chip (starting in 1999). He became a Marie-Curie fellow and later a researcher at the University of Heidelberg. He moved to BGU in 2003. Ron is the author of over 50 papers (not including mega collaboration paper in high energy physics) in both theory and experiment. Ron became an expert in combining know-how in material science and cold atom physics so as to create advanced atom chips [2, 3]. For his efforts and achievements Ron received the Willis E. Lamb award for 2011. Ron built at BGU a fabrication facility specially designed to meet the requirements of chips for miniaturised atom optics. The facility has reached a very high level and is receiving requests from around the world for atom chips. Examples include Florence, Mainz, Heidelberg, Amsterdam, Nottingham, and groups in the US. One chip featured in a Science publication [10]. A comparison between fabrication facilities, appearing in the above noted book, the BGU facility shows the highest standards. Ron’s work ranges from laser technology [4] to atom physics [5] as well as theoretical work from more technical aspects, e.g., how noise couples to atoms [6] to fundamental ones ,e e.g., two particle interference [7]. Ron takes special interest in coherence and dephasing, a topic very relevant to this project [8, 9].
[1] H. Y. Japha et al., Using time-reversal symmetry for sensitive incoherent matter-wave Sagnac interferometry, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 060402 (2007);
[2] R. Folman, Material Science for Quantum Computing with Atom Chips, in Quantum Information Processing with Neutral Atoms, Quant. Inf. Proc. 10, 995 (2011);
[3] R. Folman et al. Fabrication of atom chips, in Atom Chips, Wiley-VCH), Eds. V. Vuletic & J. Reichel (2011);
[4] D. Grosswasser et al., Retroreflecting polarization spectroscopy enabling miniaturization, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 80, 093103 (2009);
[5] S. Machluf et al., Coupling between internal spin dynamics and external degrees of freedom in the presence of colored noise, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 203002 (2010);
[6] arXiv:1108.3803;
[7] arXiv:1201.3111;
[8] C. Henkel et al., Optical discrimination between spatial decoherence and thermalization of a massive object, Phys. Rev. A 70, 023810 (2004);
[9] D. Rohrlich et al., Interference Swapping in Scattering from a Nonlocal Quantum Target, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 173601 (2006);
[10] Science 319, 1226 (2008).
