06/28/2008
The group went blueberry picking again this summer.

05/10/2008
Sarah, Clayton, and Sampad all returned to Rice for the graduation and hooding ceremonies. Congratulations to these fine doctors.

03/22/2008
Welcome to our newest group member, Mi Yan!

01/24/2008
The Rice alumni magazine, Sallyport, profiled the ultracold plasmas experiment in its fall 2007 issue. Be sure to watch the video on the website!

01/14/2008
All four of our recently graduated lab members landed on their feet in interesting and challenging jobs:

• Clayton is at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD on an NRC fellowship.
• Sarah has joined the faculty on a teaching fellowship here at Rice.
• Sampad is doing analysis for an exploratory oil firm in Houston.
• Priya is straddling the divide between R&D and sales for New Focus in San Jose, CA.

10/01/2007
Clayton successfully defended his doctoral thesis. Congratulations!

08/10/2007
A flurry of activity this week resulted in the successful doctoral defenses of Sampad and Sarah. Congratulations to them both! Pictures here.

05/10/2007
Tom and the ultracold plasma crew are featured in Rice News.

05/07/2007
Andrew is graduating. His senior thesis is titled "Photoassociative Spectroscopy of Strontium Along the 1S0-3P1 Transition using a Littman/Metcalf Laser". Congratulations!

05/04/2007
Science published a review article of ultracold plasmas written by Tom!

04/17/2007
Priya successfully defended her PhD thesis titled Expansion and Electron Temperature Evolution in an Ultracold Neutral Plasma ! Congratulations! -- Pictures from Priya's final days --

02/28/2007
Jose and Tom will attend the Atomic Processes in Plasmas conference in Gaithersburg, MD from March 19th to the 22nd. Tom will present a talk titled, "Equilibration in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas", and Jose will present a poster titled, "Ion Temperature and Expansion Velocity Measurements Through Fluorescence Imaging in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas".

02/27/2007
Clayton attended the Annual Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and Black Physics Students in Boston from February 21st to the 25th.

Tom presented a talk titled, "Pushing the Envelope of Plasma Physics: Ultracold Neutral Plasmas" for The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas last year, a video of which has been posted online.

11/01/2006
Hong Gao, our new post-doc, began working in the lab a couple of weeks ago. Welcome Gao!

05/23/2006
Nature News and Views Plasma physics: Cool vibes written by Tom.

Most of the lab group just returned from DAMOP.

Sampad, Pascal, and Tom presented talks titled, respectively:
"Gaussian expansion and electron temperature determination in ultracold Sr plasma"
"Saturation effects in photoassociation spectroscopy of 86-Sr"
"Expansion dynamics of ultracold neutral plasmas"

Clayton, Sarah, and Natali presented posters with the following titles, respectively:
"Study of ultracold strontium plasma"
"An in-house thermal evaporation system for anti-reflection coating of laser diodes" (done in conjunction with Duong from the Hulet group)
"All-optical experiments with ultracold strontium"

Priya is gone at CLEO this week.

02/17/2006
Welcome to our newest group members, Jose Castro and Dan Stark. We look forward to working more with them. Scott McIsaac and Aditya Shashi, Rice undergraduates, have also been working in the lab.

The Killian group is a founding member of the Rice Laboratory for Ultracold Physics (RLUP).

11/27/2005
Our paper on determining the scattering lengths of strontium was published. You can find it here:

P. G. Mickelson, Y. N. Martinez, A. D. Saenz, S. B. Nagel, Y. C. Chen, T. C. Killian, P. Pellegrini, and R. Cote, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 223002 (2005).

07/19/2005
The Killian Lab graduated its first student: Aaron Saenz has completed his M.S. in physics and is moving to New York. Congratulations, Aaron! -- Pictures from Aaron's final week --

05/16/2005
Welcome to our new undergraduate students:
- Kris Zarling and Andrew Traverso, both Rice students.
- Josh Dorr from the Colorado School of Mines.
- Meaghan Paceley from Caltech.
We had a sad leave-taking, as Ying-Cheng left in December for a new job in Taiwan where he seems to be doing very well so far.

12/03/2004
Web page is updated to include information on the post-doctoral position. The research page was updated as well.

11/08/2004
A post-doctoral research position in our group is available. If you are interested, please contact Tom for more information. Also, see the post-doc position.

10/05/2004
Our latest paper, Photoassociative spectroscopy at long range in ultracold strontium, is posted to the pre-print server.

09/22/2004
Posted copies of Sarah's thesis and Priya's thesis.

06/30/2004
A group outing saw the Killian Lab blueberry picking.

06/04/2004
The group traveled to DAMOP in Tucson, Arizona. Clayton, Sampad, Priya, Ying-Cheng, and Tom all presented talks on the optical imaging of ultracold plasmas, while Sarah talked about narrow-line cooling of strontium. Natali and Pascal presented posters related to narrow-line cooling.

05/01/2004
Sarah Nagel also successfully defended her master's thesis. It was titled "A Narrow Linewidth Diode Laser System for Strontium Laser Cooling Applications". A mouthful of a title, but congratulations nevertheless!

04/15/2004
It's Tax Day, and also Tom's Birthday. Happy Birthday, Tom!
Priya Gupta has successfully defended her master's thesis titled , "Pulsed Dye Laser". Good work!

04/06/2004
Using Absorption Imaging to Study Ion Dynamics in an Ultracold Plasma
Clayton Simien has successfully defended his master's thesis titled, "422 nm Laser". Congratulations.

03/15/04
Aaron Saenz is our newest group member.
Added pictures of our experiment to the "Laboratory" page.
Our pre-print (see below) was approved for publication on the 17th of February.

10/15/03
Meet our newest family member.

10/03/03
Our newest paper, on the optical imaging of plasmas, is posted to the pre-print server.

07/02/03
This web page is updated to include new group members. Welcome Ying-Cheng, Natali, Pascal, and Temple.