Hannes Pichler PhD, University of Innsbruck, Austria Tuesday, February 19, 2019, 9:00am Jefferson 356 From many-body physics to quantum information with atomic and photonic systems Quantum many-body systems have unique properties that give rise to fascinating phenomena and potential applications, ranging from exotic phases of matter to new paradigms for information processing and communication. Quantum optical systems allow to engineer such quantum many-body systems in a controlled, bottom-up approach. This enables new ways to create and probe states of matter but also poses new theoretical challenges for describing them. I will illustrate this in my talk on a few examples. I will first discuss the many-body quantum phenomena associated with arrays of trapped Rydberg atoms. This includes the equilibrium quantum phase diagram and the quantum critical behavior, as well as novel non-equilibrium phenomena such as quantum many-body scars. Moreover, I will show how these systems can be used to naturally encode combinatorial optimization problems and realize quantum optimization algorithms. In the last part of my talk I will discuss new approaches to quantum information processing with photonic systems. In particular, I will introduce delayed quantum feedback as a novel tool to create highly entangled photon states, and show that it enables universal quantum computation already with a single quantum emitter.