Fall 2020

Experiments frequently come with surprises. In this talk, I will describe the story behind the discovery of Bose fireworks, a sudden emission of matterwave jets from a driven Bose-Einstein condensate. The jet emission originates from collective scattering of atoms, seeded by quantum fluctuations and amplified by bosonic stimulation. The process results in an intricate jet emission pattern resembling those observed in high-energy collisions of heavy ions as well as Unruh radiation near the event horizon.

A new type of superlattice, known as the moiré superlattice, forms when two monolayers of van der Waals materials are vertically stacked. The period of the moire superlattice is readily controlled by the lattice constant mismatch and the twist angle. The energy modulation within a supercell varies as much as a few hundred meV, effectively trapping carriers and excitons. These superlattices exhibit a host of rich properties that may find applications in quantum information science such as an array of single quantum emitters and quantum simulations. 

Topological superconductors represent a fundamentally new phase of matter. Similar to topological insulators, the non-trivial topological characteristics of a topological superconductor dictate the presence of a topological edge states composed of Bogoliubov quasiparticles which live inside and span the superconducting gap.

Quantum dots are often described as artificial atoms because they have discrete energy levels analogous to those of natural atoms. Solid state quantum dots (e.g. InAs in GaAs) can be extended from artificial atoms to artificial molecules by controlling the relative spatial proximity and orientation of a pair of quantum dots. These pairs of dots are called quantum dot molecules (QDMs) because coherent tunnel coupling between the individual quantum dots leads to the formation of molecular states analogous to those in diatomic molecules.

‘Circuit QED’ is the quantum theory of superconducting qubits strongly interacting with microwave photons in electrical circuits. It is the leading solid-state architecture in the race to develop large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers, and is the only technology that has demonstrated quantum error correction that actually extends the lifetime of quantum information.  

In this era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing, systematic miscalibrations, drift, and crosstalk in the control of quantum bits can lead to a coherent form of error which has no classical analog. Such errors severely limit the performance of quantum algorithms in an unpredictable manner, and mitigating their impact is necessary for realizing reliable quantum computations.

Entanglement is the crucial ingredient of quantum many-body physics, and characterizing and quantifying entanglement in quantum dynamics is an outstanding challenge in today's era of intermediate scale quantum devices. Quantum simulators allow us to observe in quench dynamics the increasing complexity of the many-body wavefunction in evolution towards thermodynamic equilibrium, including regimes inaccessible to classical computation.