Team effort with a guest scientist
Extract of ETH News 01.11.2016 “This was a team effort with essential contributions by Harvard professor Eugene Demler, who collaborated with us over several months when he was an ITS fellow”, says Meinrad Sidler who is a doctoral student in Imamoğlus group. Since 2013 the Institute for Theoretical Studies (ETH-ITS) of the ETH has endeavoured to foster interdisciplinary research at the intersection between mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science.
In particular, it wants to facilitate curiosity-driven research with the aim of finding the best ideas in unexpected places.
The study by Imamoğlu and his colleagues, now published in “Nature Physics”, is a good example for how this principle can be successful. In his own research, Eugene Demler deals with ultracold atoms, studying how mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms behave. “His insight into polarons in atomic gases and solids have given our research important and interesting impulses, which we may not have come up with on our own”, says Imamoğlu.