Final Report Summary - MANYBO (Many-body physics in gauge fields with ultracold Ytterbium atoms in optical lattices)
Dilute atomic gases brought near absolute zero temperature by laser cooling techniques have recently emerged as an experimental platform to study complex collective phenomena usually encountered in much denser physical systems. The degree of experimental control, of isolation from uncontrolled environmental perturbations and the variety of experimental probes borrowed from atomic physics or quantum optics promise new insight into the physics of strongly correlated quantum matter, i.e. phases of matter where both quantum effects and interactions play a key role.
The MANYBO project aims at implementing this program in a gas of Ytterbium atoms near absolute zero, where the whole gas behaves as a quantum object (a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate). Unlike charged particles like electrons, the motion of electrically neutral atoms is normally unaffected by an applied magnetic field. However from a quantum mechanical point of view, the presence of the magnetic field is captured by the modification imposed on the electronic wavefunction. It is in principle possible to reproduce the same modifications by other means, e.g. using near-resonant lasers coupling different internal states. A suitable choice of metastable internal states leads to coherent manipulation without spontaneous emission, whose random nature would destroy the quantum coherence of the proces. We have proposed a scheme that achieves this goal and thereby produces an effective magnetic field for neutral atoms, coupling to their motion in the same way as the Lorentz force affects the motion of charged particles.
The goal of the project is to build an apparatus to demonstrate this idea experimentally, and then use it to explore the phases of matter that arise in such artificial magnetic field in a regime of strong interatomic interactions. This is realized in a so-called optical lattice trap, formed by standing laser waves forming periodic structures of light trapping atoms at the minima or maxima of the intensity. From an experimental point of view, this experiments blends quantum gases with the technology of optical atomic clocks, two of the cutting-edge technologies in atomic physics and quantum optics. We have been able to build an apparatus producing dilute Ytterbium gases near the absolute zero (a Bose-Einstein condensate), and to trap them into optical lattice potentials. Realizing effective magnetic fields is underway. We have built an ultrastable laser suitable to adress a “clock” transition with essentially no spontaneous emission and radiative losses. The laser frequency is well-defined at the 10 Hz level (to be compared to a typical optical frequency, 0.1 THz). We successfully demonstrated our ability to drive coherent Rabi oscillations between the two states of the clock transition, and performed high-precision spectroscopy on bosonic quantum gases. In the quantum regime, the spectroscopic features are dominated by atom-atom interactions. These experiments are give access to the scattering parameters of bosonic Ytterbium in the excited state, which were unknown so far .
The MANYBO project aims at implementing this program in a gas of Ytterbium atoms near absolute zero, where the whole gas behaves as a quantum object (a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate). Unlike charged particles like electrons, the motion of electrically neutral atoms is normally unaffected by an applied magnetic field. However from a quantum mechanical point of view, the presence of the magnetic field is captured by the modification imposed on the electronic wavefunction. It is in principle possible to reproduce the same modifications by other means, e.g. using near-resonant lasers coupling different internal states. A suitable choice of metastable internal states leads to coherent manipulation without spontaneous emission, whose random nature would destroy the quantum coherence of the proces. We have proposed a scheme that achieves this goal and thereby produces an effective magnetic field for neutral atoms, coupling to their motion in the same way as the Lorentz force affects the motion of charged particles.
The goal of the project is to build an apparatus to demonstrate this idea experimentally, and then use it to explore the phases of matter that arise in such artificial magnetic field in a regime of strong interatomic interactions. This is realized in a so-called optical lattice trap, formed by standing laser waves forming periodic structures of light trapping atoms at the minima or maxima of the intensity. From an experimental point of view, this experiments blends quantum gases with the technology of optical atomic clocks, two of the cutting-edge technologies in atomic physics and quantum optics. We have been able to build an apparatus producing dilute Ytterbium gases near the absolute zero (a Bose-Einstein condensate), and to trap them into optical lattice potentials. Realizing effective magnetic fields is underway. We have built an ultrastable laser suitable to adress a “clock” transition with essentially no spontaneous emission and radiative losses. The laser frequency is well-defined at the 10 Hz level (to be compared to a typical optical frequency, 0.1 THz). We successfully demonstrated our ability to drive coherent Rabi oscillations between the two states of the clock transition, and performed high-precision spectroscopy on bosonic quantum gases. In the quantum regime, the spectroscopic features are dominated by atom-atom interactions. These experiments are give access to the scattering parameters of bosonic Ytterbium in the excited state, which were unknown so far .