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Molecules Under a Microscope

Molecules Under a Microscope

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Single site resolved molecules

In our lab, we are building a quantum gas microscope for ultracold molecules. This is an attempt to bring together our established work on the creation and coherent control of dipolar molecules, with the exquisite spatial resolution and control afforded by recent developments in high-resolution imaging of ultracold atoms in optical lattices.

Quantum Simulation with Ultracold molecules

Our experiment is designed to study large arrays of molecules in periodic potentials, which have been proposed as a highly versatile platform for studying quantum matter. Thanks to the long-range dipole-dipole interactions between heteronuclear molecules and coherent control over rotational states, many different aspects of quantum many-body physics can be studied. Condensed matter theorists propose using molecules in experiments like ours to study topological superfluidity, Chern insulating phases and many-body localisation phenomena, for a review see e.g. Bohn, J. L., et.al Science 357.6355 (2017). Our experiment aims to advance the techniques used to make and manipulate molecules and work towards the study of novel quantum phenomena in a regime beyond the reach of classical computation.

Recent Progress

Recently we have observed the Superfluid- Mott Insulator transition in our optical lattice, benchmarking the periodic potential and laying a foundation for further experiments with quantum gas mixtures and molecules. Our next step will be to add high-resolution imaging to our system to observe single-site resolved correlations in these lattices.

Project Members

Simon Cornish

PI

Sarah Bromley

Post Doc

Andrew Innes

Post Doc

Jonathan Mortlock

PhD Student

Alex Matthies

PhD student

Adarsh Raghuram

PhD student