News: Research Highlights

Thu February 27, 2020

Probing entanglement in a many-body-localized system

An interacting quantum system that is subject to disorder may cease to thermalize owing to localization of its constituents, thereby marking the breakdown of thermodynamics. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the system’s entanglement, which is experimentally challenging to measure. We realized such a many-body–localized system in a disordered Bose-Hubbard chain and characterized...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu February 27, 2020

String patterns in the doped Hubbard model

Understanding strongly correlated quantum many-body states is one of the most difficult challenges in modern physics. For example, there remain fundamental open questions on the phase diagram of the Hubbard model, which describes strongly correlated electrons in solids. We realized the Hubbard Hamiltonian and searched for specific patterns within the individual images of many realizations...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu February 27, 2020

Quantum critical behavior at the many-body localization transition

Phase transitions are driven by collective fluctuations of a system’s constituents that emerge at a critical point. This mechanism has been extensively explored for classical and quantum systems in equilibrium, whose critical behaviour is described by the general theory of phase transitions. Recently, however, fundamentally distinct phase transitions have been discovered for out-of-equilibrium quantum systems,...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu February 27, 2020

Laser-cooling and Optical Trapping of Diatomic Molecules

Ultracold molecules have been proposed as a rich resource for many applications ranging from precision measurements and quantum metrology to quantum simulation and quantum information processing. The benefits of molecules in all these applications arise from the many internal degrees of freedom in a molecule. For example, even with the simplest diatomic molecules, one has...
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Research Highlights
Thu February 20, 2020

Correcting the “jitters” in quantum devices

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office February 18, 2020 Labs around the world are racing to develop new computing and sensing devices that operate on the principles of quantum mechanics and could offer dramatic advantages over their classical counterparts. But these technologies still face several challenges, and one of the most significant is how...
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Research Highlights
Tue January 14, 2020

Transform-limited photons from a tin-vacancy spin in diamond

One of the goals of the CUA is to develop quantum networks: systems of stationary quantum memories connected by photons. Solid-state quantum emitters that combine coherent optical transitions, long-lived spin states, and the potential for scalability are critical components of future quantum information systems. Many emitters are candidates, with some desirable properties, but all have...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu May 9, 2019

Near Unitary Squeezing

A group at the MIT led by Prof. Vladan Vuletić has recently generated significant amount of spin squeezing-a type of quantum entanglement-in an ultracold vapor of ytterbium-171. Spin squeezed states (SSS) can be used to overcome the standard quantum limit (SQL) which bounds state-of-the-art atomic sensors like optical clocks. The latter deploy a dilute vapor...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu May 2, 2019

String patterns in the doped Hubbard model

Understanding strongly correlated quantum many-body states is one of the most thought-provoking challenges in modern research. For example, the Hubbard model, describing strongly correlated electrons in solids, still contains fundamental open questions on its phase diagram. In this work we realize the Hubbard Hamiltonian and search for specific patterns within many individual images of realizations...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon April 22, 2019

Direct Laser Cooling Rubidium Atoms

A group at MIT led by Vladan Vuletic has recently created a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms with a new method, direct laser cooling. Many researchers have attempted this elusive goal in the past, but due to various complications resorted to reaching BEC through evaporation instead. Compared to cooling through evaporation, laser cooling is...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri April 19, 2019

Probing entanglement in a many-body-localized system

An interacting quantum system that is subject to disorder may cease to thermalize due to localization of its constituents, thereby marking the breakdown of thermodynamics. The key to our understanding of this phenomenon lies in the system’s entanglement, which is experimentally challenging to measure. We realize such a many-body-localized system in a disordered Bose-Hubbard chain...
Read More »
News type:
Research Highlights