Professor Christopher Foot

Having begun his physics career with a first-class honours degree and doctorate from the University of Oxford, Professor Christopher Foot spent several years working at Stanford University, supported in part by a Lindemann Trust Fellowship. He returned to the Oxford Physics Department and started research on laser cooling and trapping of atoms. Since 1991 he has been a tutorial fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. His current research interests include the study of the superfluid properties of ultra-cold atomic gases (Bose-Einstein condensates), and experiments on ultra-cold atoms held in arrays of optical traps formed by laser light to study the quantum properties of many-particle systems. Such atomic physics techniques give very precise control over the cold-atom systems so that they can be used to simulate phenomena that occur in condensed matter physics and, in the future, for quantum information processing.