Abstract: Can a material be made of light? Can quantum mechanics help us measure time? These are two questions in quantum science that I directly address using the tools of atomic physics and quantum optics. We first explore the requirements to make a quantum Hall material made of light. We trap photons inside of a curved-mirror non-planar optical resonator to confine the transverse motion of photons and imbue them with an effective mass and an effective magnetic field for photons. We add strong repulsive interactions by hybridizing resonator photons with Rydberg excitations of a cold atomic gas, and we observe the formation of the ground state of highly correlated topological matter made of light. We next turn to a broad effort in quantum science—to help us to compute more efficiently and to measure the world more precisely. In an optical-tweezer-trapped array of strontium atoms, we leverage recent ideas developed in quantum information processing for related metrological goals. We demonstrate nearly a minute of atomic coherence on an optical-frequency clock transition. We then generate metrologically useful entanglement between clock-transition qubits using Rydberg excitations, and we show that this entanglement persists for approximately four seconds. Beyond enabling quantum-enhanced optical clocks, this work opens the door to studies of interacting spin and Hubbard models, efficient computing architectures, and database search algorithms.
Location: PSC 2136 and Zoom