optical lattice

To help overcome the challenges of working directly with phonons in physical materials, JQI Fellow Victor Galitski, JQI postdoctoral researcher Colin Rylands and their colleagues have cast photons in the role of phonons in a classic story of phonon-driven physics.

Exotic physics can happen when quantum particles come together and talk to each other. Understanding such processes is challenging for scientists, because the particle interactions can be hard to glimpse and even harder to control. Moreover, modern computer simulations struggle to make sense of all the intricate dynamics going on in a large group of particles. Luckily, atoms cooled to near zero temperatures can provide insight into this problem.Lasers can make cold atoms mimic the physics seen in other systems—an approach that is familiar terrain for atomic physicists. They regularly use intersecting laser beams to capture atoms in a landscape of rolling hills and valleys called an optical lattice. Atoms, when cooled, don’t have enough energy to walk up the hills, and they get stuck in the valleys. In this environment, the atoms behave similarly to the electrons in the crystal structure of many solids, so this approach provides a straightforward way to learn about interactions inside real materials. But the conventional way to make optical lattices has some limitations. The wavelength of the laser light determines the location of the hills and valleys, and so the distance between neighboring valleys—and with that the spacing between atoms—can only be shrunk to half of the light’s wavelength. Bringing atoms closer than this limit could activate much stronger interactions between them and reveal effects that otherwise remain in the dark. Now, a team of scientists from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), in collaboration with researchers from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck, Austria, has circumvented the wavelength limit by leveraging the atoms’ inherent quantum features, which should allow atomic lattice neighbors to get closer than ever before. The new technique manages to squeeze the gentle lattice hills into steep walls separated by only one-fiftieth of the laser’s wavelength—25 times narrower than possible with conventional methods. The work, which is based on two prior theoretical proposals, was recently published in Physical Review Letters.

For scientists investigating the behavior of cold atoms trapped in a web of interfering lasers, two kinds of atoms can be better than one. The second species allows researchers to study more complex dynamics, like how the interactions between atoms caught in a 3-D lattice can form molecules stationed at the same site.

In the quest to better explain and even harness the strange and amazing behaviors of interacting quantum systems, well-characterized and controllable atomic gases have emerged as a tool for emulating the behavior of solids. This is because physicists can use lasers to force atoms in dilute quantum gases to act, in many ways, like electrons in solids. The hope is studying the same physics in the atom-laser system will help scientists understand the inner workings of different exotic materials.JQI physicists, led by Trey Porto, are interested in quantum magnetic ordering, which is believed to be intimately related to high-temperature superconductivity and also has significance in other massively connected quantum systems. Recently, the group studied the magnetic and motional dynamics of atoms in a specially designed laser-based lattice that looks like a checkerboard. Their work was published in the journal Science.

Quantum computers will someday perform calculations impossible for conventional digital computers.  But for that to happen, the core quantum information must be preserved against contamination from the environment.  In other words, decoherence of qubits must be forestalled.  Coherence, the ability of a system to retain quantum integrity---meaning that one part of the system can be used to predict the behavior of other parts---is an important consideration.