Measurement-induced long-range entanglement in a hot, strongly-interacting atomic system

April 2019. The ICFO team has used quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement to generate long-lived, long-range entanglement in a dense, hot, strongly-interacting atomic system [1]. This implements a central element of proposals for detection [2-4] and production [5] of complex anti-ferromagnetic phases. The resulting entangled state is exceptionally resistant to thermal decoherence, and shares several traits...

Supersolid behavior of a dipolar quantum gas

April 2019. The LENS team has found experimentally a regime in which a quantum gas of magnetic atoms has supersolid properties, i.e. it behaves simultaneously as a solid and a superfluid [1,2]. This discovery ends a quest lasting more than 15 years, motivated by the seminal theory work by outstanding theorists, among which the QUIC...

Light-cone for the propagation of information in interacting lattices

March 2019. The quantum matter team at Institut Polytechnique de Paris has unveilled the emergence of a twofold light-cone structure for the propagation of information in lattice models with short and long range interactions [1,2]. The two structures may be related to different characteristics of the many-body excitation spectrum and shed new light on Libe-Robinson-like...

Fermionization of a strongly-correlated Bose gas

November 2018. The quantum matter team at Institut Polytechnique de Paris has devised a new method to demonstrate the onset of fermionization in a trapped, strongly-correlated Lieb-Liniger (Bose) gas [1]. Using a combination of analytical and numerical calculations, they have shown that the Tan contact, a pivotal quantity in strongly-correlated quantum gases, displays a marked...

Self-bound liquid droplets in free space

March 2018. The LENS team observed the formation of liquid-like droplets in a quantum gas of ultracold atoms in free space. These atomic systems result to be confined on a finite volume even in the absence of any external potential, due to a self-binding mechanism coming from the competition of attractive and repulsive forces in...

A new phase of matter: quantum liquid droplets

January and March 2018: In two recent papers published during the first trimester of 2018, the ICFO team has observed and studied for the first time a novel type of ultra-dilute quantum liquid that goes beyond the standard van der Waals paradigm. This liquid forms droplets: macroscopic clusters of ultra-cold atoms that are eight orders...

As the atoms flow

July 2017: Borrowing a technique developed for mapping electrical conductance in semiconductor devices, QUIC physicists at ETH imaged cold neutral atoms as they are transported through constrictions narrow enough for quantum effects to come into play. These results highlight the potential of using neutral atoms to simulate electronic transport in nanoscale devices. Through a series of...

QUIC at BEC2017 conference in Sant Feliu

The QUIC consortium is very glad to support the international conference Bose-Einstein Condensation 2017 - Frontiers in Quantum Gases that will take place in Sant Feliu de Guixols, Spain, on 2-8 September 2017. Several QUIC members will actively participate to the conference, presenting their latest achievements on the quantum simulation of insulators and conductors.

Milestone: realization of topological insulators

September 2016: QUIC has reached the first milestone on the realization of topological insulators just few weeks before the Nobel prize in Physics for 2016 to F. D. M. Haldane was announced! Shortly before the kick-off of the QUIC project, the ETHZ group successfully realized a quantum simulation of the topological Haldane model in an...

Measurement of the spectral function in disordered potentials

July 2017: The IOGS team has developed a method allowing to measure the spectral functions of non-interacting ultra-cold atoms in a three-dimensional disordered potential resulting from an optical speckle field. Varying the disorder strength by two orders of magnitude, they observe the crossover from the "quantum" perturbative regime of low disorder to the "classical" regime...