Ruichao (Alex) Ma
PhD, Harvard University 2014
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago
“Exploring Synthetic Quantum Matter in Superconducting Circuits”
Tuesday, February 26, 9:00am
Jefferson 256
Abstract:
Understanding strongly correlated materials is an outstanding challenge in modern physics.
Synthetic quantum matter, tailor-made in the lab as clean, tunable and easy to probe
quantum simulators, can help us gain insights into such strongly correlated matter, and
explore new parameter regimes with no natural counterpart.
In this talk, I will show how we create and explore quantum materials made of light,
specifically microwave photons trapped in superconducting circuits. We develop a new
approach for preparing many-body phases, where engineered dissipation is used as a
resource to protect the fragile quantum states against intrinsic losses. We apply it to
our system, a strongly interacting Bose-Hubbard lattice, and realize a dissipatively
stabilized Mott insulator of photons. The dynamics of thermalization towards the Mott
phase is probed using lattice-site- and time- resolved microscopy.
Our experiments establish superconducting circuits as a powerful platform for studying
quantum materials, and open many future possibilities including the exploration of
strongly interacting topological phases, quantum thermodynamics in coherent or
driven-dissipative settings, and hybrid quantum systems with exotic couplings.
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