Center for Ultracold Atoms and Quantum Gases, IExP and IQOQI, Innsbruck
Category for scientific news of the Erbium group
The last 15 years has seen tremendous experimental progress for the manipulation and control of ultracold atoms with sizeable dipole-dipole interactions. In this review, together with other group leaders who first condensed dysprosium and chromium, we review the discoveries made so far, and lay out the future perspectives for this exciting field!
The paper can be found here: Dipolar physics: a review of experiments with magnetic quantum gases – IOPscience
Now published in PRR with collaborators from ICFO, Barcelona! In the recent years, great effort has been devoted toward the study of symmetry-protected topological phases. We show that the bond order wave (BOW) induced by frustration between competing couplings has a nontrivial topological sector in the presence of chiral symmetry. We reveal its topological nature by finding a nonzero string order correlator and a degenerate entanglement spectrum, and design a realistic experimental scheme involving magnetic atoms trapped in an optical lattice. The latter paves the way towards an efficient quantum simulation of topological phases in many-body quantum systems.
The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. Research, and the pre-print here: arXiv
Now published in PRA with collaborators from JILA, Boulder (Colorado, USA), we accurately determine the scattering length for the four bosonic erbium isotopes with highest abundance in the magnetic field range from 0G to 5G. We use the cross-dimensional thermalization technique and extract the scattering length by applying a fit of the complete Enskog equations of change and by utilizing an analytic formula for the so-called number of collisions per re-thermalization. We benchmark our results with the very accurate but experimentally more demanding lattice modulation spectroscopy, confirming the accuracy of our experimental protocol.
The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. A, and the pre-print here: arXiv
In collaboration with our colleagues from ICFO in Barcelona, we theoretically investigate the topological properties of the bond order wave in the extended Fermi-Hubbard model. We find that in a finite sized system, a topological order in the bond order wave regime can be stabilized experimentally allowing for the preparation of topologically protected edge modes. We finally propose an experimental scheme for the implementation and detection of this particular quantum phase.
The arXiv link is here
It is now an exciting time to work with ultracold highly-magnetic quantum gases, thrived by the rapid developments of quantum science based on lanthanide species. We are continually searching for outstanding Master and PhD Students!