Tue December 10, 2024 4:00 pm
CUA Seminar – Monika Aidelsburger: Floquet realization of the Mott-Meissner phase in large bosonic flux ladders
Location:Harvard Ory Forum (301 A/B) in the Goel Building (60 Oxford)
Monika Aidelsburger,
Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik
Ten Minute Talk:"Update: There will be no 10 Minute Talk today!"
Periodically driven quantum systems can realize novel phases of matter that are not
present in time-independent Hamiltonians. One important application is the
engineering of synthetic gauge fields, which opens the realm of topological physics
to neutral atom quantum simulators. Extending methods based on periodic driving to
the many-body regime constitutes an exceptional challenge, since the system
eventually heats up to infinite temperatures and becomes featureless. So far
experiments have mostly followed a bottom-up approach and realized two-particle
interacting systems with the aim of scaling the system to many particles. Here, I
report on recent progress where we realize the strongly correlated Mott-Meissner
phase in large-scale, bosonic flux ladders with 48 sites at half filling. By combining
quantum gas microscopy with local basis rotations, we reveal the emerging
equilibrium particle currents with local resolution across large systems. We find chiral
currents exhibiting a characteristic interaction scaling, providing direct experimental
evidence of the interacting Mott-Meissner phase. Our findings demonstrate the
feasibility of scaling periodically driven quantum systems to large, strongly correlated
phases, paving the way for exploring topological and fractional quantum Hall matter
with single-atom resolution and control.