"How close is 42 to ∞?" (Prof. Selim Jochim)

4 pm today
Datum: 04.06.2024
Uhrzeit: 16:00
Vortragender: Prof. Selim Jochim
Physikalisches Institut, Universität Heidelberg
Ort: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
Raum: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall

For many phenomena that occur in Nature, a successful description commonly involves taking the limit of a continuum, i. e. an infinite system size. It is our quest to understand how such a continuum emerges from a finite system size, where access to single particle resolved quantities is still available.

In terms of energy scales, this involves the competition of three energy scales:

a)The interaction strength between atoms, that can be tuned using a Feshbach resonanceb)The finite energy gap between single particle states or energy shells stemming from the confinement, c)The Fermi energy, controlled by the number of fermionic atoms is the scale driving the convergence of observables to the continuum limit.

In our experiments we harmonically trap a fixed number of atoms in two dimensions, with the largest number to date being 42 fermionic atoms.This corresponds to six shells being filled, with the Fermi energy significantly surpassing the shell spacing. Our tunable platform allows us to manipulate such systems with an extreme fidelity. As one example we can control the (relative) angular momentum between two single atoms in such a configuration, allowing us to prepare a microscopic Laughlin wave function.