March 23, 2015 – May 08, 2015

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Location

Institute of Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

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Organizers

Tin-Lun Ho, Ohio State University
Cheng Chin, University of Chicago
Immanuel Bloch, Max Planck Institute, Munich
Peter Zoller, University of Innsbruck

Overview

For workshop website and to register Click here.

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Quantum simulation with cold atoms is among the most ambitious endeavors in atomic physics. The goal is to realize important yet unsolved quantum Hamiltonians using cold atoms so as to understand their properties; and to produce novel quantum states that are difficult to realize or completely inaccessible in solid state materials. In the last seven years, a worldwide effort has been devoted to pursuing these goals. In his process, researchers from diverse disciplines (atomic, molecular, and optical physics, to condensed matter, nuclear, gravitational and high energy physics, as well as quantum information science) were brought together. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the most active researchers in this field to discuss the latest developments, fundamental issues, and major challenges.

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Our workshop will including the following forefronts of Quantum Simulation:

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(i) synthetic gauge fields—Current efforts include realization and understanding the properties of lattice quantum gases with one flux quantum per cell (equivalent to hundreds of tesla in solid state physics), quantum gases with large spin orbit couplings, and exotic quantum Hall states not realizable in solid state systems.

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(ii) Strongly interacting gases—Recent experimental developments include realization of mixture of Bose superfluid and strongly interacting Fermi superfluid, scale invariant properties of 2D strongly interacting gases, new universal scaling in quantum quenching of strongly interacting regime.  Theoretical efforts in these areas currently underway.

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(iii) High spin quantum gases and SU(N) quantum gases—Experiments can now create quantum
degenerate bosons and fermions with spin 9 and 21/2 respectively. In addition, interacting fermion systems with SU(N) symmetry have also been realized. Many remarkable thermodynamic properties of these systems are observed. There are now a great deal of actives in these areas.

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(iv) Ultra-low temperature and limit of adiabaticity—The greatest challenge in Quantum Simulation is to reach temperatures low enough to reveal the ground state properties of novel quantum matters.  Often, such temperature requirement is very challenging. The question of cooling is also related to the fundamental issue of adiabaticity, as relaxation processes of the system slow down as temperature decreases. This raises the question of possible fundamental limit in reaching low temperatures.

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(v) Quantum Simulation of Lattice Gauge field theory: Recently, there has been theoretical work from the high energy physics community to use lattice quantum gases to perform computations for lattice gauge field theory. We shall explore in this workshop the feasible of such schemes in cold atom systems.  

 

Our workshop will include physicists from different discipline. To prepare for that, we have gathered a group of organizers with expertise spreading over many areas : Bloch and Chin are cold atom experimentalists. Ho is a cold atom and condensed matter theorist. Zoller is a theorist in quantum computation, quantum optics, and cold atoms. Uwe-Jens Wiese is a high energy theorist. One of the goal of our workshop is to broaden the activities of Quantum Simulation to the high energy physics community.

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*** Our workshop will run for seven weeks, from March 23 to May 8. There will be an international conference from March 30 to April 2.

 

This workshop will take place at the Institute of Nuclear Theory of University of Washington at Seattle, and is given a budget of $98000 by INT. We are writing to seek additional funding of $35000 so as to include more participants to the workshop. The website of the Workshop is
http://www.int.washington.edu/PROGRAMS/15-1/ .