Speaker
Description
Cavity quantum electrodynamics studies the strong interaction between matter and the electromagnetic field of an optical cavity: the enhanced interaction is useful both for reading the properties of the atoms with a fast, sensitive and weakly destructive measurement and for quantum simulation where atoms interact by exchanging photons with each other at a distance. One of the drawbacks of these systems is the loss of spatial information that cavity-based measurement implies: the result of these measurements is an average of the properties of the atoms over the entire cavity field volume.
I will explain how we built and operated a cavity-microscope device that overcomes this problem: it realizes both a cavity and a pair of high numerical-aperture lenses in a single device and can be used to couple a microscopic part of the atomic cloud to the cavity field. We produce a cavity-based image of the atomic density by scanning the position of the microscope focus [1].
This technology opens the doors to analog quantum simulations of programmable, all-to-all interacting systems. I will report about the self-organization phase transition of a Fermi gas in a high-finesse cavity in the presence of tight confinement and the development of optical techniques to randomize cavity-mediated interactions. These interactions can drastically change the behavior of the system, and open the door to the exploration of models of holographic quantum matter such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model [2][3].
