JQI Seminar

The optical frequency comb is one of the most significant advances in laser physics since the
development of the laser itself. It has made routine the counting and synthesis of the oscillations
of light on the femtosecond time scale, and it is an essential component of all present and future
optical clocks and time-transfer systems. It further enables the most accurate measurement of any
fundamental physical quantity—that of the quantized energy states of atoms and ions with 18

Speaker #1:  Alexander Schuckert

Tittle:  Fault-tolerant fermionic quantum computation with fermionic atoms

Van der Waals heterostructures composed of atomically thin semiconductors have recently
emerged as a platform for studying strongly interacting electronic and excitonic systems. In this
talk, I will discuss a few ongoing experiments aimed at probing and controlling their excitonic
phases. One focus is the exploration of exciton condensates, where we realize long-lived
excitons with large binding energies and low disorder—critical factors for realizing high-
temperature condensates. Furthermore, I will highlight how exciton-carrier interactions can

Controlling the functional properties of quantum materials with light has emerged as a frontier of condensed matter physics, leading to discoveries of various light-induced phases of matter, such as superconductivity, ferroelectricity, magnetism, and charge density waves. However, in most cases, the photoinduced phases return to equilibrium on ultrafast timescales after the light is turned off, limiting their practical applications.

We have recently created the first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of dipolar
molecules [1-3]. We efficiently cool sodium-cesium molecules from 700 nK to less
than 10 nK, deep into the quantum degenerate regime. The lifetime of the molecular
BEC is longer than one second, reaching a level of stability similar to ultracold atomic
gases. A cornerstone of this advance is double microwave shielding, a novel
technique that gives us control over intermolecular interactions and reduces inelastic

Abstract: Electron spins in semiconductor quantum dots typically interact with many nuclear spins in their semiconductor environments, realizing a manifestation of the central spin problem. The central spin problem is a widely studied model of decoherence and is predicted to exhibit a rich variety of interesting and useful phenomena, only some of which have been observed. In this talk, I will discuss a series of experiments exploring these dynamics in silicon quantum dots.

Laser-cooled atoms in a high-finesse optical cavity are a powerful tool for quantum simulation and quantum sensing.  The optical-cavity enhances the light-matter interaction, mediating effective atom-atom interactions and probing of the quantum state below the mean-field level.  In this talk, I will provide an overview of my group’s recent work in this area.  We perform cavity-enhanced quantum non-demolition measurements to create highly-entangled states [1], with the first realization of a squeezed matter wave interferometer for inertial sensing [2] and a squeezin

Abstract:  Inhomogeneities are common in quantum materials and can radically impact their fundamental as well as functional properties. In this talk, I will discuss femtosecond resolved nanoscale snapshots of an insulator to metal phase transition in a Vanadium Dioxide thin film. Inhomogeneous development of metallicity is observed at nanometer length scales and picosecond timescales. Movies of the phase transition are found to correlate with heterogeneous features observed in the steady state including grain boundaries and twin domains.