Jessica Yinka Thomas

About

Jessica Yinka Thomas is an Associate Professor of Practice and the Director of the Business Sustainability Collaborative at the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University. She has over fifteen years of experience working domestically and internationally in sustainable enterprise, social innovation, and business development. Her professional background includes leadership roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where she was managing director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and program director of the Business Accelerator for Sustainable Entrepreneurship. She has also held leadership positions at Duke University’s Competition for Underserved and Resource-poor Economies (CUREs), CFED, an economic development organization in Durham, North Carolina, as well as roles in engineering and new product development in educational toy and communications industries. Her academic focus is on social innovation, sustainable business, and sustainability, with active involvement in initiatives such as the Business Analytics and AI Initiative and the Business Sustainability Collaborative. She holds an MBA from Duke University Fuqua School of Business and a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University.

Research topics

• Physics
• Computer Science
• Quantum mechanics
• Statistical physics
• Condensed matter physics

Selected publications

• Designer Spatial Control of Interactions in Ultracold Gases

  Physical Review Letters · 2019-02-01 · 38 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Designer optical control of interactions in ultracold atomic gases has wide applications, from creating new quantum phases to modeling the physics of black holes. We demonstrate wide tunability and spatial control of interactions in a two-component cloud of ^{6}Li fermions, using electromagnetically induced transparency. With two control fields detuned ≃1.5 THz from atomic resonance, megahertz changes in the frequency of one optical beam tune the measured scattering length over the full range ac…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring the Hydrodynamic Linear Response of a Unitary Fermi Gas

  Physical Review Letters · 2019-10-15 · 34 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We directly observe the hydrodynamic linear response of a unitary Fermi gas confined in a box potential and subject to a spatially periodic optical potential that is translated into the cloud at speeds ranging from subsonic to supersonic. We show that the time-dependent change of the density profile is sensitive to the thermal conductivity, which controls the relaxation rate of the temperature gradients and hence the responses arising from adiabatic and isothermal compression.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spin-energy correlation in degenerate weakly interacting Fermi gases

  Physical review. A/Physical review, A · 2019-06-20 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The time evolution of spin-energy correlations in a very weakly interacting Fermi gas of ${}^{6}$Li produces complex spin-density profiles, which are observed and quantitatively explained by a one-dimensional mean-field model. This system exhibits rich collective dynamics for exploring the interplay between spin, motion, Fermi statistics, and interactions in many-body systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Energy-Resolved Information Scrambling in Energy-Space Lattices

  Physical Review Letters · 2021 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Weakly interacting Fermi gases simulate spin lattices in energy space, offering a rich platform for investigating information spreading and spin coherence in a large many-body quantum system. We show that the collective spin vector can be determined as a function of energy from the measured spin density, enabling general energy-space resolved protocols. We measure an out-of-time-order correlation function in this system and observe the energy dependence of the many-body coherence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Probing Energy-Dependent Feshbach Resonances by Optical Control

  Physical Review Letters · 2018-10-17 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Optical control enables new high resolution probes of narrow collisional (Feshbach) resonances, which are strongly dependent on the relative momentum of colliding atom pairs, and important for simulating neutron matter with ultracold atomic gases. We demonstrate a two-field optical vernier, which expands kHz (mG) magnetic field detunings near a narrow resonance into MHz optical field detunings, enabling precise control and characterization of the momentum-dependent scattering amplitude. Two-phot…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Quantum Hydrodynamics and Energy Flow in Fermi Gases

  NSF · $570k · 2017–2021

• Quantum Hydrodynamics in Interacting Fermi Gases

  NSF · $538k · 2014–2017

• Time-Dependent Hydrodynamics in Uniform Fermi Gases

  NSF · $563k · 2023–2027

Frequent coauthors

• Michael E. Gehm

  34 shared

• K. M. O’Hara

  Pennsylvania State University

  33 shared

• J. Kinast

  23 shared

• Ilya Arakelyan

  North Carolina State University

  20 shared

• S. R. Granade

  20 shared

• James A. Joseph

  VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System

  18 shared

• A. Turlapov

  16 shared

• Samir Bali

  Miami University

  16 shared

Education

• BS, Ph. D., Physics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Awards & honors

• Mark Beasley, Jessica Thomas Recognized for Outstanding Outr…
• BSC Director Jessica Thomas honored for teaching business as…

Similar researchers at North Carolina State University

• Rob Handfieldh-71
• Bradley Kirkmanh-61
• Barry Goodwinh-58