Jérome Dubail’s team recently received an ANR funding for their project titled “Fluctuations of Gross-Pitaevskii Fluids of Light and Atoms”. Togethe with Isabelle Bouchoul, from Institut d’Optique, Pierre Suret, from université de Lille, and collaborators from Cergy Université, they aim to find the right theory describing the fluctuations caused by thermal and quantum effects in one-dimensional gases of photons and atoms.
In nature, systems of many interacting particles often behave as continuous fluids at large scales. On smaller scales, deviations from local equilibrium can be triggered by spontaneous fluctuations originating from local equilibrium can be triggered by spontaneous fluctuations originating from thermal or quantum effects. Observing these fluctuations experimentally and pin-pointing the right theory to describe them is a frontier of modern Physics.
With this project, the scientists aim to do just that. They will focus on a special class of one-dimensional gases of photons and atoms. This particular class caught their attention because of its dynamic properties, which enable it to retain its initial state for longer than an ordinary gas.
For this study, Isabelle Bouchoule’s and Pierre Suret’s teams will bring their experimental expertise while Jérome Dubail’s will focus on the theoritical part. As for Cergy Université, the groups there will assist the project by developing new statistical models and computational tools to describe the microscopic fluctuations in the studied class of gases.
