Short biography
Verònica Ahufinger graduated in Physics at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona in 1997. Later she received her Master (1999) and her PhD degree in Physics (2002) at the same university. During her PhD studies, she spent three months at the European Laboratory for non-linear spectroscopy (LENS) in Florence and 11 weeks at the Waals Van der Waals-Zeeman Instituut in Amsterdam. She got the PhD extraordinary Award in 2003 and the Award of the Catalan Physical Society for her Master research work in 2000. Verònica was Marie Curie Fellow for two years at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Hannover Universität. At the beginning of 2005, she came back to the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona and from November 2005 to October 2010 she was ICREA researcher at this university. Since November 2010 she is professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her current research interests include light-matter interactions, ultracold atoms and quantum information. Research interests
The main part of my research is devoted to the physics of ultracold atoms (atoms that are at a temperature of about few billionths of a degree above absolute zero) trapped in optical lattices (two counterpropagating laser beams that form a periodic potential). The idea is to study the different phases that the system can exhibit depending of the type of atoms considered, the intensity of the laser beams or the addition of extra potentials like disorder. Key words
Ultracold atoms, Solitons, Atom-Light interactions, Quantum Information