Paul Constantine Condylis

Marie-Curie postdoc
(March 2006 - April 2010)

Email: condylis (at) bec.gr

>> CV

I joined the group in March 2006 and have been enjoying the endless sunshine since then. During my stay so far, I have worked on some projects with respect to setting up the BEC experiment.

First of all, our experiment will utilize time-average adiabatic potentials (TAAP) to trap a cloud of condensed 87Rb atoms. In a simple form, this trap is a mixture of a standard TOP (time-orbiting potential) trap with additional resonant RF dressing fields, that can produce ring-shaped traps, amongst other topologies. To create this sort of trapping potential several analog outputs are required to produce the currents for the magnetic fields which trap the atoms. The waveform signals required are both LF at around 20 kHz, and RF with frequencies from 200 kHz to 50 MHz. My first project was to find and order the equipment best suited to our experiment.

My next project was to build the vacuum system. This is a work in progress, at the moment. Our system will comprise of two quartz vacuum cells, one for producing an atomic beam, and the other to collect the atoms from that beam and cool them to produce a BEC. Soon this will be setup in the lab, ready for making an intense 2D MOT source of cold atoms, which is my other current project.

Before landing on Crete, I was a member of the Centre for Cold Matter (CCM) group of Prof. Ed Hinds at Imperial College London. There I completed my PhD working on the experiment searching for time reversal symmetry violation in YbF molecules: looking for the interaction of the electric dipole moment of the electron with the molecule via its tiny shift to the molecular energy levels. This challenging experiment is still in progress, so watch-out for their latest results on the CCM website.