Benjamin Lev, assistant professor of physics, has been selected for a 2009 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a cross-disciplinary program that offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the in
Lev will use the five-year grant to create and study exotic forms of matter by developing the enabling technology for the quantum manipulation of dipolar atoms. Ultracold gases of highly magnetic atoms, such as dysprosium, offer opportunities to explore strongly correlated matter in the presence of long-range interactions in a manner difficult to achieve in other experimental settings. Techniques will be developed to perform the first laser cooling, and subsequent trapping in optical lattices, of dysprosium. This achievement will lead to the investigation of exotic states of matter that, in several cases, underlie proposed descriptions of poorly understood, though technologically relevant, condensed matter materials that do not obey standard Fermi liquid theory.