Supervisor: Anne E. B. Nielsen

What does an everyday object like an egg box have to do with quantum mechanics and high-powered lasers? One might argue that the question is weird, and that would indeed be a reasonable point of view. However, if we devoted some time to a seemingly non-sensical question we can gain some valuable insights into the realm of condensed matter physics.

This colloquium aims to present the fundamentals of optical lattices in a brief manner. We will explain some core ideas from which we will examine a basic model describing bosons in a lattice. From the model we will uncover two interesting regimes of bosonic interactions in a lattice: the superfluid phase and the Mott insulator phase. We will present an experiment which has proved the existence of the regimes as well as the transition between the two, not unlike the classical phase transitions from solid and liquid phases.

Finally, we will look at the current state of optical lattices and a possible future.