Special AMO Seminar

Long-range interactions play an important role in nature; however, quantum simulations of lattice systems have largely not been able to realize such interactions. A wide range of efforts are underway to explore long-range interacting lattice systems using AMO and condensed matter platforms. We achieve novel quantum phases in a strongly correlated lattice system with long-range dipolar interactions using ultracold magnetic erbium atoms. As we tune the dipolar interaction to be the dominant energy scale in our system, we observe quantum phase transitions from a superfluid into dipolar quantum solids, which we directly detect using site-resolved quantum gas microscopy. Furthermore, I will report our on-going work in soft core boson simulation, including preliminary results on coupled chains of 1D Haldane Insulator phases. In addition to being an excellent platform for Hubbard physics, our experiment is also a fantastic platform for spin physics. I will briefly report our work in spin squeezing, where we achieved 7dB metrologically useful squeezing with roughly 200 atoms in an optical lattice. Our work demonstrates that novel strongly correlated quantum phases can be studied using dipolar interaction of magnetic atoms in optical lattices, opening the door to quantum simulations of a wide range of lattice models with long-range and anisotropic interactions.