We generate and characterize entangled states of a register of 20 individually controlled qubits, where each qubit is encoded into the electronic state of a trapped atomic ion. Entanglement is generated amongst the qubits during the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of an Ising-type Hamiltonian, engineered via laser fields. Since the qubit-qubit interactions decay with distance, entanglement is generated at early times predominantly between neighboring groups of qubits. We characterize entanglement between these groups by designing and applying witnesses for genuine multipartite entanglement. Our results show that, during the dynamical evolution, all neighboring qubit pairs, triplets, most quadruplets, and some quintuplets simultaneously develop genuine multipartite entanglement. Witnessing genuine multipartite entanglement in larger groups of qubits in our system remains an open challenge.

We investigate the transport properties of neutral, fermionic atoms passing through a one-dimensional quantum wire containing a mesoscopic lattice. The lattice is realized by projecting individually controlled, thin optical barriers on top of a ballistic conductor. Building an increasingly longer lattice, one site after another, we observe and characterize the emergence of a band insulating phase, demonstrating control over quantum-coherent transport. We explore the influence of atom-atom interactions and show that the insulating state persists as contact interactions are tuned from moderately to strongly attractive. Using bosonization and classical Monte Carlo simulations, we analyze such a model of interacting fermions and find good qualitative agreement with the data. The robustness of the insulating state supports the existence of a Luther-Emery liquid in the one-dimensional wire. Our work realizes a tunable, site-controlled lattice Fermi gas strongly coupled to reservoirs, which is an ideal test bed for nonequilibrium many-body physics.

When a mobile hole is moving in an antiferromagnet it distorts the surrounding Néel order and forms a magnetic polaron. Such interplay between hole motion and antiferromagnetism is believed to be at the heart of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. In this article, we study a single hole described by the $t\text{−}{J}_z$ model with Ising interactions between the spins in two dimensions. This situation can be experimentally realized in quantum gas microscopes with Mott insulators of Rydberg-dressed bosons or fermions, or using polar molecules. We work at strong couplings, where hole hopping is much larger than couplings between the spins. In this regime we find strong theoretical evidence that magnetic polarons can be understood as bound states of two partons, a spinon and a holon carrying spin and charge quantum numbers, respectively. Starting from first principles, we introduce a microscopic parton description which is benchmarked by comparison with results from advanced numerical simulations. Using this parton theory, we predict a series of excited states that are invisible in the spectral function and correspond to rotational excitations of the spinon-holon pair. This is reminiscent of mesonic resonances observed in high-energy physics, which can be understood as rotating quark-antiquark pairs carrying orbital angular momentum. Moreover, we apply the strong-coupling parton theory to study far-from-equilibrium dynamics of magnetic polarons observable in current experiments with ultracold atoms. Our work supports earlier ideas that partons in a confining phase of matter represent a useful paradigm in condensed-matter physics and in the context of high-temperature superconductivity in particular. While direct observations of spinons and holons in real space are impossible in traditional solid-state experiments, quantum gas microscopes provide a new experimental toolbox. We show that, using this platform, direct observations of partons in and out of equilibrium are now possible. Extensions of our approach to the $t\text{−}J$ model are also discussed. Our predictions in this case are relevant to current experiments with quantum gas microscopes for ultracold atoms.

We consider the ground-state properties of an impurity particle (“polaron”) resonantly interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Focusing on the equal-mass system, we use a variational wave function for the polaron that goes beyond previous work and includes up to three Bogoliubov excitations of the BEC, thus allowing us to capture both Efimov trimers and associated tetramers. We find that the length scale associated with Efimov trimers (i.e., the three-body parameter) can strongly affect the polaron’s behavior, even at densities where there are no well-defined Efimov states. However, by comparing our results with recent quantum Monte Carlo calculations, we argue that the polaron energy is a universal function of the Efimov three-body parameter for sufficiently low boson densities. We further support this conclusion by showing that the energies of the deepest bound Efimov trimers and tetramers at unitarity are universally related to one another, regardless of the microscopic model. On the other hand, we find that the quasiparticle residue and effective mass sensitively depend on the coherence length $\xi$ of the BEC, with the residue tending to zero as $\xi$ diverges, in a manner akin to the orthogonality catastrophe.

Quantum logic gates are fundamental building blocks of quantum computers. Their integration into quantum networks requires strong qubit coupling to network channels, as can be realized with neutral atoms and optical photons in cavity quantum electrodynamics. Here we demonstrate that the long-range interaction mediated by a flying photon performs a gate between two stationary atoms inside an optical cavity from which the photon is reflected. This single step executes the gate in $2\mu \mathrm{s}$. We show an entangling operation between the two atoms by generating a Bell state with 76(2)% fidelity. The gate also operates as a cnot. We demonstrate 74.1(1.6)% overlap between the observed and the ideal gate output, limited by the state preparation fidelity of 80.2(0.8)%. As the atoms are efficiently connected to a photonic channel, our gate paves the way towards quantum networking with multiqubit nodes and the distribution of entanglement in repeater-based long-distance quantum networks.

Optical cavity QED provides a platform with which to explore quantum many-body physics in driven-dissipative systems. Single-mode cavities provide strong, infinite-range photon-mediated interactions among intracavity atoms. However, these global all-to-all couplings are limiting from the perspective of exploring quantum many-body physics beyond the mean-field approximation. The present work demonstrates that local couplings can be created using multimode cavity QED. This is established through measurements of the threshold of a superradiant, self-organization phase transition versus atomic position. Specifically, we experimentally show that the interference of near-degenerate cavity modes leads to both a strong and tunable-range interaction between Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped within the cavity. We exploit the symmetry of a confocal cavity to measure the interaction between real BECs and their virtual images without unwanted contributions arising from the merger of real BECs. Atom-atom coupling may be tuned from short range to long range. This capability paves the way toward future explorations of exotic, strongly correlated systems such as quantum liquid crystals and driven-dissipative spin glasses.

Coherent many-body quantum dynamics lies at the heart of quantum simulation and quantum computation. Both require coherent evolution in the exponentially large Hilbert space of an interacting many-body system. To date, trapped ions have defined the state of the art in terms of achievable coherence times in interacting spin chains. Here, we establish an alternative platform by reporting on the observation of coherent, fully interaction-driven quantum revivals of the magnetization in Rydberg-dressed Ising spin chains of atoms trapped in an optical lattice. We identify partial many-body revivals at up to about ten times the characteristic time scale set by the interactions. At the same time, single-site-resolved correlation measurements link the magnetization dynamics with interspin correlations appearing at different distances during the evolution. These results mark an enabling step towards the implementation of Rydberg-atom-based quantum annealers, quantum simulations of higher-dimensional complex magnetic Hamiltonians, and itinerant long-range interacting quantum matter.

In a many-body localized (MBL) quantum system, the ergodic hypothesis breaks down, giving rise to a fundamentally new many-body phase. Whether and under which conditions MBL can occur in higher dimensions remains an outstanding challenge both for experiments and theory. Here, we experimentally explore the relaxation dynamics of an interacting gas of fermionic potassium atoms loaded in a two-dimensional optical lattice with different quasiperiodic potentials along the two directions. We observe a dramatic slowing down of the relaxation for intermediate disorder strengths. Furthermore, beyond a critical disorder strength, we see negligible relaxation on experimentally accessible time scales, indicating a possible transition into a two-dimensional MBL phase. Our experiments reveal a distinct interplay of interactions, disorder, and dimensionality and provide insights into regimes where controlled theoretical approaches are scarce.

We present a general approach for the solution of the three-body problem for a general interaction and apply it to the case of the Coulomb interaction. This approach is exact, simple, and fast. It makes use of integral equations derived from the consideration of the scattering properties of the system. In particular, this makes full use of the solution of the two-body problem, the interaction appearing only through the corresponding known $T$ matrix. In the case of the Coulomb potential, we make use of a very convenient expression for the $T$ matrix obtained by Schwinger. As a check, we apply this approach to the well-known problem of the helium atom ground state and obtain a perfect numerical agreement with the known result for the ground-state energy. The wave function is directly obtained from the corresponding solution. We expect our method to be, in particular, quite useful for the trion problem in semiconductors.

We report on the first streaking measurement of water-window attosecond pulses generated via high-harmonic generation, driven by sub-2-cycle, carrier-to-envelope-phase-stable, 1850-nm laser pulses. Both the central photon energy and the energy bandwidth far exceed what has been demonstrated thus far, warranting the investigation of the attosecond streaking technique for the soft-x-ray regime and the limits of the frogcrab retrieval algorithm under such conditions. We also discuss the problem of attochirp compensation and issues regarding much lower photoionization cross sections compared with the extreme ultraviolet in addition to the fact that several shells of target gases are accessed simultaneously. Based on our investigation, we caution that the vastly different conditions in the soft-x-ray regime warrant a diligent examination of the fidelity of the measurement and the retrieval procedure.

Difficult problems described in terms of interacting quantum fields evolving in real time or out of equilibrium abound in condensed-matter and high-energy physics. Addressing such problems via controlled experiments in atomic, molecular, and optical physics would be a breakthrough in the field of quantum simulations. In this work, we present a quantum-sensing protocol to measure the generating functional of an interacting quantum field theory and, with it, all the relevant information about its in- or out-of-equilibrium phenomena. Our protocol can be understood as a collective interferometric scheme based on a generalization of the notion of Schwinger sources in quantum field theories, which make it possible to probe the generating functional. We show that our scheme can be realized in crystals of trapped ions acting as analog quantum simulators of self-interacting scalar quantum field theories.

The interaction of a single photon with an individual two-level system is the textbook example of quantum electrodynamics. Achieving strong coupling in this system has so far required confinement of the light field inside resonators or waveguides. Here, we demonstrate strong coherent coupling between a single Rydberg superatom, consisting of thousands of atoms behaving as a single two-level system because of the Rydberg blockade, and a propagating light pulse containing only a few photons. The strong light-matter coupling, in combination with the direct access to the outgoing field, allows us to observe, for the first time, the effect of the interactions on the driving field at the single-photon level. We find that all our results are in quantitative agreement with the predictions of the theory of a single two-level system strongly coupled to a single quantized propagating light mode.

We consider a general model of unitary parameter estimation in the presence of Markovian noise, where the parameter to be estimated is associated with the Hamiltonian part of the dynamics. In the absence of noise, the unitary parameter can be estimated with precision scaling as $1/T$, where $T$ is the total probing time. We provide a simple algebraic condition involving solely the operators appearing in the quantum master equation, implying, at most, $1/\sqrt{T}$ scaling of precision under the most general adaptive quantum estimation strategies. We also discuss the requirements a quantum error-correction-like protocol must satisfy in order to regain the $1/T$ precision scaling in case the above-mentioned algebraic condition is not satisfied. Furthermore, we apply the methods developed to understand fundamental precision limits in atomic interferometry with many-body effects taken into account, shedding new light on the performance of nonlinear metrological models.

When a physical system is subjected to a strong external multifrequency drive, its dynamics can be conveniently represented in the multidimensional Floquet lattice. The number of Floquet lattice dimensions equals the number of irrationally-related drive frequencies, and the evolution occurs in response to a built-in effective “electric” field, whose components are proportional to the corresponding drive frequencies. The mapping allows us to engineer and study temporal analogs of many real-space phenomena. Here, we focus on the specific example of a two-level system under a two-frequency drive that induces topologically nontrivial band structure in the 2D Floquet space. The observable consequence of such a construction is the quantized pumping of energy between the sources with frequencies ${\omega }_1$ and ${\omega }_2$. When the system is initialized into a Floquet band with the Chern number $C$, the pumping occurs at a rate $P_{12}=-P_{21}=(C/2\pi )\hslash {\omega }_1{\omega }_2$, an exact counterpart of the transverse current in a conventional topological insulator.

The understanding of physical properties of fermions in the unitary regime, where the $s$-wave scattering length in the collisional channel of particles is longer than both the interparticle distance and the size of the interaction potential, is a crucial issue for electron systems of high-temperature superconductivity, dilute nucleons in nuclei, and neutron stars. We experimentally determine various thermodynamic quantities of interacting two-component fermions at the zero-temperature limit from the BCS region to the unitarity limit. The obtained results are very accurate in the sense that the systematic error is within 4% in the unitary regime. Using this advantage, we can compare our data with various many-body theories. We find that an extended $T$-matrix approximation, which is a strong-coupling theory involving fluctuations in the Cooper channel, well reproduces our experimental results. We also find that the superfluid order parameter $\mathrm{\Delta }$ calculated by solving the ordinary BCS gap equation with the chemical potential of interacting fermions is close to the binding energy of the paired fermions directly observed in a spectroscopic experiment and that obtained using a quantum Monte Carlo method.

We show that the dynamics of particles in a one-dimensional harmonic trap with hard-core interactions can be solvable for certain arrangements of unequal masses. For any number of particles, there exist two families of unequal mass particles that have integrable dynamics, and there are additional exceptional cases for three, four, and five particles. The integrable mass families are classified by Coxeter reflection groups and the corresponding solutions are Bethe-ansatz-like superpositions of hyperspherical harmonics in the relative hyperangular coordinates that are then restricted to sectors of fixed particle order. We also provide evidence for superintegrability of these Coxeter mass families and conjecture maximal superintegrability.

Quasiperiodic modulation can prevent isolated quantum systems from equilibrating by localizing their degrees of freedom. In this article, we show that such systems can exhibit dynamically stable long-range orders forbidden in equilibrium. Specifically, we show that the interplay of symmetry breaking and localization in the quasiperiodic quantum Ising chain produces a quasiperiodic Ising glass stable at all energy densities. The glass order parameter vanishes with an essential singularity at the melting transition with no signatures in the equilibrium properties. The zero-temperature phase diagram is also surprisingly rich, consisting of paramagnetic, ferromagnetic, and quasiperiodically alternating ground-state phases with extended, localized, and critically delocalized low-energy excitations. The system exhibits an unusual quantum Ising transition whose properties are intermediate between those of the clean and infinite randomness Ising transitions. Many of these results follow from a geometric generalization of the Aubry-André duality that we develop. The quasiperiodic Ising glass may be realized in near-term quantum optical experiments.

Understanding the robustness of topological phases of matter in the presence of strong interactions and synthesizing novel strongly correlated topological materials lie among the most important and difficult challenges of modern theoretical and experimental physics. In this work, we present a complete theoretical analysis of the synthetic Creutz-Hubbard ladder, which is a paradigmatic model that provides a neat playground to address these challenges. We give special attention to the competition of correlated topological phases and orbital quantum magnetism in the regime of strong interactions. These results are, furthermore, confirmed and extended by extensive numerical simulations. Moreover, we propose how to experimentally realize this model in a synthetic ladder made of two internal states of ultracold fermionic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. Our work paves the way towards quantum simulators of interacting topological insulators with cold atoms.

We demonstrate sensing of inhomogeneous dc magnetic fields by employing entangled trapped ions, which are shuttled in a segmented Paul trap. As sensor states, we use Bell states of the type $|\uparrow \downarrow ⟩+{\mathrm{e}}^{\mathrm{i}\phi }|\downarrow \uparrow ⟩$ encoded in two ${}^{40}{\mathrm{Ca}}^{+}$ ions stored at different locations. The linear Zeeman effect leads to the accumulation of a relative phase $\phi$, which serves for measuring the magnetic-field difference between the constituent locations. Common-mode magnetic-field fluctuations are rejected by the entangled sensor state, which gives rise to excellent sensitivity without employing dynamical decoupling and therefore enables accurate dc sensing. Consecutive measurements on sensor states encoded in the $S_{1/2}$ ground state and in the $D_{5/2}$ metastable state are used to separate an ac Zeeman shift from the linear dc Zeeman effect. We measure magnetic-field differences over distances of up to 6.2 mm, with accuracies down to 300 fT and sensitivities down to $12\mathrm{pT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$. Our sensing scheme features spatial resolutions in the 20-nm range. For optimizing the information gain while maintaining a high dynamic range, we implement an algorithm for Bayesian frequency estimation.

We propose and discuss quantum spin lenses, where quantum states of delocalized spin excitations in an atomic medium are focused in space in a coherent quantum process down to (essentially) single atoms. These can be employed to create controlled interactions in a quantum light-matter interface, where photonic qubits stored in an atomic ensemble are mapped to a quantum register represented by single atoms. We propose Hamiltonians for quantum spin lenses as inhomogeneous spin models on lattices, which can be realized with Rydberg atoms in 1D, 2D, and 3D, and with strings of trapped ions. We discuss both linear and nonlinear quantum spin lenses: in a nonlinear lens, repulsive spin-spin interactions lead to focusing dynamics conditional to the number of spin excitations. This allows the mapping of quantum superpositions of delocalized spin excitations to superpositions of spatial spin patterns, which can be addressed by light fields and manipulated. Finally, we propose multifocal quantum spin lenses as a way to generate and distribute entanglement between distant atoms in an atomic lattice array.