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RESEARCH
Strongly correlated physics with
ultracold gases of polar molecules
We aim to produce quantum gases of bosonic and fermionic NaK molecules cooled to nanoKelvin (nK) temperatures - more than a million times colder than interstellar space. At these temperatures, the molecules' strong, long-range, anisotropic electric-dipole interactions dominate their many-body behavior, taking us far beyond the short-range contact interactions familiar from neutral atom experiments.
In the bulk, these dipolar forces can drive striking collective phenomena, including supersolids, dipolar quantum crystals, and p-wave topological superfluids. By incorporating an optical lattice and a high-NA microscope objective, we will pin the molecules in a crystal of light and image every site individually. This capability will allow us to engineer extended Hubbard and dipolar spin Hamiltonians, track correlations, and explore quantum phases that have so far remained purely theoretical.
Quantum computing with
polar molecules in tweezer arrays
In this experiment, we assemble individual KCs molecules in tightly focused optical tweezers, arranging them like pixels in a two-dimensional grid. Each molecule's hyperfine levels will serve as qubits with seconds-long coherence times, while microwave or static electric fields can be applied to switch on dipolar interactions at will, enabling efficient and stable two-qubit gates via dipolar exchange.
Using a programmable tweezer array, we can re-position any pair of molecules on demand, achieving the flexible connectivity required for complex quantum algorithms and quantum error-correction codes. Moreover, the molecules' rich internal structure supports multilevel (qudit) encodings, allowing more efficient use of quantum resources as the processor scales from tens to thousands of sites.
Other research interests: strongly interacting atomic gases and mixtures
Beyond molecules, we investigate ultracold atoms in the strongly interacting regime - where the scattering length between atoms rivals or even exceeds the mean interparticle spacing, pushing the system to the unitary limit. Using magnetic Feshbach resonances, we precisely tune interactions from weak to resonant and explore phenomena such as Fermi and Bose polarons, where a single impurity dresses itself with excitations of the quantum bath, and collective modes and vortex formation, which reveal non-equilibrium many-body dynamics in strongly correlated fluids.
