Abstract |
The dream of the quantum engineer is to have an arbitrary waveform generator
for designing quantum states and Hamiltonians. Motivated by this vision, I
will report on advances in optical control of long-range interactions among
cold atoms. By coupling atoms to light in an optical resonator, we induce
tunable non-local spin-spin interactions, characterizing the resulting
dynamics by real-space imaging. Notably, in a spin-1 system, we observe
photon-mediated spin mixing, a new mechanism for producing correlated atom
pairs. In a separate platform, we employ Rydberg dressing to induce Ising
interactions in a dilute gas of cesium atoms in their hyperfine clock states,
enabling the realization of a Floquet transverse-field Ising model. I will
discuss prospects in quantum simulation and quantum metrology promised by the
versatility of optical control.
[1] Ar-39 dating with small samples provides new key constraints on ocean
ventilation, Nature Comm. 9, 5046 (2018).[2] Observation of universal dynamics
in a spinor Bose gas far from equilibrium, Nature 563, 217 (2018). |