Cold Atomic Gases Seminar

Speaker:

Leonardo Fallani, LENS

Title:

New quantum systems with ultracold two-electron fermions

Abstract:

Ultracold two-electron fermions are a powerful resource for engineering synthetic many-body quantum systems, as they exhibit two distinct internal degrees of freedom – nuclear spin and electronic state – that can be both manipulated in a quantum coherent way. The control of the nuclear spin allowed us to study the physics of multicomponent fermions with SU(N) interaction symmetry, with intriguing properties emerging when the atoms are trapped in low dimensions. Furthermore, by coupling different internal states we have demonstrated the possibility of engineering “synthetic dimensions”, in which an effective lattice dynamics is encoded in the internal Hilbert space of single atoms. By using this approach, we have demonstrated a new technique for the production of synthetic gauge fields for neutral atoms and observed the emergence of edge currents in fermionic ladders with tunable flux.