Quantum Simulation and Sensing with Matterwave Interferometers and Clocks
Quantum Colloquium
Date
Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:00 - 12:00
Speaker
James K. Thompson (JILA / University of Colorado, Boulder (US))
Location
Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101)
Series
Colloquium
Tags
Quantum Colloquium
Host
Onur Hosten
Contact
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 groups recent experimental 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 squeezing-enhanced differential strontium optical lattice clock comparison [3]. We have also realized cavity-mediated momentum-exchange interactions that give rise to a collective recoil mechanism with analogies to Mssbauer spectroscopy for suppressing Doppler dephasing in matter wave interferometers [4] and on optical transitions [5]. We have realized 3 and 4-body interactions [6] as well as arbitrary XYZ Hamiltonian engineering in a matter wave interferometer, including realizing two-axis counter twisting for the first time since its proposal more than 30 years ago [7]. We have utilized spin-exchange interactions [8] to explore several dynamical phase transitions [9] including an emulation of long-predicted dynamical phases of a BCS superconductor [10, 11]. If time permits, I will lastly touch on the observation of a dissipative superradiant phase transition [12] and truly continuous lasing between momentum states [13].
[1] Cox et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116(9), 093602 (2016).
[2] Greve, Luo et al, Nature, 610(7932), 472-477 (2022).
[3] Robinson et al, Nature Physics 20, 208 (2024).
[4] Luo et al, Science 384, 551 (2024).
[5] Niu et al, arXiv:2409.16265 (2024).
[6] Luo et al, arXiv:2402.19492 (2024).
[7] Luo et al, arXiv:2410.12132 (2024).
[8] Norcia et al, Science 361, 6399, 259 (2018).
[9] Muniz et al, Nature 580, 602 (2020).
[10] Young et al, Nature 625, 679-684, (2024).
[11] Young et al, arXiv:2408.12640 (2024).
[12] Song et al, arXiv:2408.11086 (2024).
[13] Schfer et al, arXiv:2405.20952 (2024).