Cheng Chin

Professor
Dept. of Physics, James Franck institute, Enrico Fermi institute, and College

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Background

Cheng Chin earned his B.S. degree in Physics from National Taiwan University in 1993 and his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Stanford University in 2001 under the advisory of Dr. Steven Chu. He conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford (2001~2003) and at Innsbruck University (2003~2005). He joined the University of Chicago in 2005 and has been a full professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi institute, and the James Franck institute since 2012. He has also been a visiting professor at Innsbruck University (Austria), ETH (Switzerland), Rice University, MIT, Academic Sinica (Taiwan), Univ. of Ulm(Germany), Univ. of Munich(Germany), Max Planck institute (Germany), JILA, Tsinghua University (China) and National Sun Yat-Sen University (Taiwan).

Research

Cheng Chin’s research focuses on experimental atomic,molecular and optical (AMO) physics. Recent works include laser cooling, Bose-Einstein condensation of atoms and molecules, strongly interacting Fermi gas, Feshbach and Efimov resonances, quantum information science, novel quantum states and quantum dynamics, thermophoretic levitation, and quantum simulation of condensed matter, nuclear, high-energy and cosmological systems.

Selected Publications

• Transition from an atomic to a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate

News & Highlights

• In long-awaited breakthrough, UChicago scientists harness molecules into single quantum state (April 28, 2021)

• Scientists use atoms to simulate quantum physics in curved spacetimes (June 18. 2019)

• Machine learning reveals hidden turtle pattern in quantum fireworks (February 8, 2019)

• $22 million for quantum research at UChicago and national labs (September 26, 2018)