News: Research Highlights

Sat June 13, 2020

‘Photon crystals’ could be made using Rydberg atoms

Physicists in the US have come up with a way of making photons repel each other by sending them through an ultracold atomic gas. This astonishing feat could lead to the creation of “photon crystals” and exotic quantum states such as a Mott insulator.   Image caption: In vacuum optical system for photon-photon interactions.
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News type:
Research Highlights
Sun June 7, 2020

Entanglement-based Optical Atomic Clock beats the Standard Quantum Limit

Optical lattice clocks (OLC) are widely recognized as the next golden standard for timekeeping. Over the past decades, researchers around the world have made the second the best characterized among all seven of International System of Units (SI units), reaching an unprecedented fractional stability at few parts-of-ten-Quintillion (1019). Despite the tremendous effort of improving technology...
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Research Highlights
Fri April 10, 2020

Bose polarons meet their fate at quantum criticality

An electron moving through the crystal lattice of a solid slightly attracts the ions on its path. The electron and the crystal deformations move together a “quasi-particle”, heavier than the bare electron – the so-called polaron. Such quasi-particles form the basis of descriptions of many solids. However, in modern materials, such as the high-temperature superconducting cuprates,...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Wed April 8, 2020

New “refrigerator” super-cools molecules to nanokelvin temperatures

For years, scientists have looked for ways to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, at which point the molecules should slow to a crawl, allowing scientists to precisely control their quantum behavior. This could enable researchers to use molecules as complex bits for quantum computing, tuning individual molecules like tiny knobs to carry out multiple...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon March 30, 2020

Searching for new boson with isotope shift spectroscopy

Dark matter is one of the main unknowns in our understanding of the universe. There are numerous types and classes of candidates for dark matter. Light-force carriers may be exciting candidates given their potential for displaying intra-atomic forces that may be probed with precision atomic spectroscopy. They are so-far-unknown elementary bosons that may carry mass...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon March 30, 2020

Squeezing space in a rotating quantum gas

In its most famous form, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation tells us that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle. The best we can do is to redistribute the intrinsic quantum uncertainty, for example by making position more precise at the expense of momentum, via a procedure known as squeezing. However, the...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon March 30, 2020

Repulsive photons in a quantum nonlinear medium

Photons, the smallest energy carriers of light, interact extremely weakly in vacuum. However, realizing strongly interacting photons at the individual photon level is fascinating, as it allows people to use light to control light. This opens the possibility to implement quantum information science, to design all-optical quantum devices, and to form novel quantum many-body states...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu March 5, 2020

Novel method for easier scaling of quantum devices

System “recruits” defects that usually cause disruptions, using them to instead carry out quantum operations.

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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu February 27, 2020

Probing entanglement in a many-body-localized system

An interacting quantum system that is subject to disorder may cease to thermalize owing to localization of its constituents, thereby marking the breakdown of thermodynamics. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the system’s entanglement, which is experimentally challenging to measure. We realized such a many-body–localized system in a disordered Bose-Hubbard chain and characterized...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu February 27, 2020

String patterns in the doped Hubbard model

Understanding strongly correlated quantum many-body states is one of the most difficult challenges in modern physics. For example, there remain fundamental open questions on the phase diagram of the Hubbard model, which describes strongly correlated electrons in solids. We realized the Hubbard Hamiltonian and searched for specific patterns within the individual images of many realizations...
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News type:
Research Highlights