Nir Navon

Nir Navon's picture
Assistant Professor of Physics
He/him/his
Sloane Physics Laboratory 50A
+1 (203) 436-4997
Research Areas: 
Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics
Research Type: 
Experimentalist
Current Projects: 

Ultracold Quantum Matter

Biographical Sketch: 

Nir Navon is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University. He received his undergraduate degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) with a Master’s degree from the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France). In 2011, he obtained his Ph.D degree from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), where he developed novel methods to probe the thermodynamics of ultracold strongly correlated gases. He went on to a visiting stay at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel), where he developed high-fidelity entangling gates between trapped ions. He was then elected a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College (Cambridge, UK), and joined the Cavendish Laboratory. During that period, he investigated the equilibrium and non-equilibrium behavior of homogeneous gases of weakly interacting bosons using groundbreaking advances in optical box trapping of atoms. He joined the Department of Physics at Yale in 2017.

Research : 

Nir Navon’s research focuses on various aspects of the quantum many-body problem; his lab uses synthetic ultracold matter in programmable traps as a versatile experimental platform for this exploration. His lab’s interests revolve around two broad axes: the study of the emergence of order and collective phenomena in homogeneous quantum matter, and the understanding of far-from-equilibrium turbulent dynamics of quantum fluids.

Education: 
PhD, Ecole Normale Supérieure/Paris 6, 2011
Honors & Awards: 

2020 – NSF CAREER award
2019 – Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
2017 – David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship
2012 – Elected Fellow of Trinity College (Cambridge)

Selected Publications: 

Many-body Decay of the Gapped Lowest Excitation of a Bose-Einstein Condensate, J. Zhang, C. Eigen, W. Zheng, J. A. P. Glidden, T. A. Hilker, S. J. Garratt, R. Lopes, N. R. Cooper, Z. Hadzibabic, N. Navon, arXiv:2004.11363 (2020)

Synthetic dissipation and cascade uxes in a turbulent quantum gas, N. Navon, C. Eigen, J. Zhang, R. Lopes, A.L. Gaunt, K. Fujimoto, M. Tsubota, R.P. Smith, Z. Hadzibabic, Science 366, 382 (2019)

From single-particle excitations to sound waves in a box-trapped atomic BEC, S.J. Garratt, C. Eigen, J. Zhang, P. Turzak, R. Lopes, R.P. Smith, Z. Hadzibabic, N. Navon, Phys. Rev. A 99, 021601(R) (2019)

Emergence of a Turbulent Cascade in a Quantum Gas, N. Navon, A.L. Gaunt, R.P. Smith, Z. Hadzibabic, Nature 539, 72 (2016)

Further Publications