Ultracold Strontium

Fig. 1  Our strontium magneto-optical trap.

In April 2015, we started a new lab with the aim of studying many-body quantum physics with ultracold strontium atoms in optical lattices. Our lab is located at the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, in Immanuel Bloch’s Quantum Many-Body Physics Division.

Within the last ten years, we have witnessed an exciting interaction between precision measurement and many-body physics because the world’s most accurate and precise clocks — operating at the 2 × 10^-18 level — are based on fermionic ⁸⁷Sr trapped in optical lattices. Doing measurements with 18 digits of precision required understanding the interactions between the strontium atoms at an unprecedented level.

Research

We believe that the strontium atom offers many more exciting possibilities to improve our understanding of many-body quantum physics. We are working towards

Fig. 2 In-vacuum buildup cavity for optical lattices spanning 1 mm³

• Spin-dependent lattices for the clock states using tuneout wavelengths
• Very large and homogeneous lattice systems using in-vacuum buildup cavities (see Fig. 2)
• Fermi gases with SU(N = 10) collisional symmetry
• Single-site and single-atom resolved quantum gas microscopy for strontium

References

If you would like to learn more, here is a list of the most relevant review papers related to our work:

1. I. Bloch, J. Dalibard, and S. Nascimbène
   Quantum simulations with ultracold quantum gases
   Nature Physics
   8
   267
   2012
2. A. D. Ludlow, M. M. Boyd, J. Ye, E. Peik, and P. O. Schmidt
   Optical atomic clocks
   Reviews of Modern Physics
   87
   637
   2015
3. A. J. Daley
   Quantum computing and quantum simulation with group-II atoms
   Quantum Information Processing
   10
   865
   2011