Do you want to understand how (and why) food foams are made or why the elasticity of steak matters? Why do some chefs use liquid nitrogen (at about -320 degrees F) to freeze ingredients? Have you ever wondered about the secrets behind the wild creations at Chef Jose Andres' world famous DC based Minibar? Have you ever heard of Soft Condensed Matter Physics? Want to learn more is the science behind these pioneering approaches to taste and presentation?

Recent Georgetown Physics graduate Mark Jreissaty (A.B. 2011) has turned his award-winning Senior Thesis into a scientific publication in the prestigious American Physical Society journal Physical Review A. Working with Prof. Marcos Rigol, a graduate student, and a post-doc, Mark studied how bosonic Mott insulators in optical lattices expand when a confining potential is turned off. In addition to advancing the understanding of these intriguing systems, the work provides the basis for a novel type of atom laser.

The development of practical devices for quantum computation will likely require interconnecting different types of subcomponents. Single photons are a promising means for this interconnection, but photons from different components need to be made indistinguishable in order to be able to carry out the computations.

The eighth installment of the Mid-Atlantic Soft Matter workshop (MASM8) will be held at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) on the 9th of December from 8:50am - 5:50 pm. To learn more about the workshop and to attend, you can go to the event website. This workshop is being sponsored by the Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology and NIST.