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Over the last decade, physicists have learned to assemble "atom by atom" a synthetic quantum matter. This seminar will present one example based on laser-cooled ensembles of individual atoms trapped in microscopic optical tweezer arrays.
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Fluorescence images of individual atoms trapped in various optical tweezers arrays. Each point corresponds to an atom.
By exciting them to Rydberg states, we control their interactions even at micrometer distances. In this way, we study the many-body properties of more than a hundred interacting spins, in a regime where simulations by usual numerical methods are already very challenging when not impossible. Beyond the study of many-body problems, the control gained over the atoms could find applications in metrology and could lead to the development of a quantum computer. Some aspects of this research led to the creation of a company, Pasqal.
The speaker: Antoine Browaeys is a senior staff Scientist at CNRS. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan (France) and did his ph’D under Alain Aspect at the Institut d’Optique (2000). He spent two years at NIST in the Laser Cooling group led by W.D. Phillips. He was hired as a scientist at CNRS in 2003. He is working on experiments manipulating individual cold atoms and small, dense atomic clouds. Part of his research led to the creation of the Pasqal company, that he is a co-founder and scientific adviser of.
He was awarded the Aimé Cotton Prize of the French Physical Society in 2007, the Silver medal of CNRS in 2021, and in 2026 the Norman Ramsey Prize of the APS, the Herbert Walther Prize of the DPG, and the John Bell Prize . He was elected member of the French academy of science in decembre 2023.