Many-body Physics with Arrays of Individual Atoms
This talk will present our effort to control and use the dipole-dipole interactions between cold atoms in order to implement spin Hamiltonians useful for quantum simulation of condensed matter situations. We trap individual atoms in arrays of optical tweezers separated by a few micrometers.
We create almost arbitrary geometries of the arrays with units filling in two and three dimensions up to about 200 atoms. To make the atoms interact, we excite them to Rydberg states. This configuration implements naturally spin models, such as the
quantum Ising or the XY models. We use this
platform to study open questions related to
quantum magnetism and synthetic topological
matter.