Center for Ultracold Atoms and Quantum Gases, IExP and IQOQI, Innsbruck
Pramodh Yapa 
Congratulations to our Masters student, Sarah Embacher, who defended her thesis today! 🥳 Sarah worked in the ERBIUM lab where she implemented a scanning optical dipole trap and also carried out simulations of how q-plates can be used to create optical potentials. ⚛️🔦
After a short break, Sarah will be returning to the ERBIUM lab as a PhD student. Well done on your defense, and we look forward to having you back soon, Sarah!
We said goodbye to Postdoc Thomas Bland in December 2024! Dr. Bland joined the Ferlaino Group in December 2020 as one of the first members of the theory team. Tom was at the forefront of demystifying two-dimensional supersolidity, and we thank him for leading the theory team for four glorious years! Tom has now moved back to the UK and will soon start a new position as a senior researcher in the group of Stephanie M. Reimann at Lund University. Best of luck at your new position, Tom!
Quanta Magazine has declared our research on the ‘Observation of vortices in a dipolar supersolid‘ one of 2024’s Biggest Breakthrough in Physics!
Moving from the largest stage to the very smallest one, physicists who manipulate atoms, molecules and crystals in the lab have also spent 2024 in the throes of discovery, having achieved astonishing levels of precision and control over their quantum quarries. A team in Innsbruck created a long-predicted exotic state of matter called a supersolid, and even imaged the hallmark “quantum tornadoes” that formed when they stirred an otherwise rigid crystal of dysprosium atoms. Astrophysicists suspect that this supersolid phase might arise inside incredibly dense, fast-spinning stars called pulsars.
Read the rest of 2024’s Biggest Breakthroug here: The Year in Physics
Watch the Quanta video, featuring Francesca and PhD student Elena Poli, here: Youtube Explainer
Read the feature by Quanta Magazine here: Physicists spot quantum tornadoes twirling in a supersolid
See the article in Nature here: Observation of vortices in a dipolar supersolid
Read the pre-print here: arXiv:2403.18510.
2024’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics: Our research on the observation of vortices in a dipolar supersolid featured by Quanta magazine!
Now published in the journal “Physical Review Letters”, and featured in Physics Magazine as an Editors’ Suggestion!
The T-REQS Lab presents the first successful trapping of single erbium atoms in an array of optical tweezers, marking a significant milestone in the use of erbium for quantum simulation. For the experimental details of this achievement by the T-REQS team, see the following excerpt from the abstract:
Using a single narrow-line optical transition, we achieve deep cooling for direct tweezer loading, pairwise ejection, and continous imaging without additional recoil suppression techniques. Our tweezer wavelength choice enables us to reach the magic trapping condition by tuning the ellipticity of the trapping light. Additionally, we implement an ultrafast high-fidelity fluorescence imaging scheme using a broad transition, allowing time-resolved study of the tweezer population dynamics from many to single atoms during light-assisted collisions. In particular, we extract a pair-ejection rate that qualitatively agrees with the semiclassical predictions by the Gallagher-Pritchard model.
See the article in PRL here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.223402
Read the Physics Magazine Synopsis here: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/s151
See the pre-print here: Optical Tweezer Arrays of Erbium Atoms arxiv.org/abs/2405.01499.
Congratulations to Senior Scientist, Dr. Manfred Mark on officially receiving his habilitation at UIBK!