TORYD, the ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Jérôme Beugnon

Jérôme Beugnon, researcher in our team Bose-Einstein condensates, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant 2019 for his project TOpological many-body states with ultracold RYDberg atoms, or in short TORYD.

This project aims at studying experimentally the dynamics of quantum gases of bosons in controlled geometries with a specific focus on the regime of strong interactions between particles. In this regime, it will be possible to achieve exotic phases of matter in which, for instance, new transport properties for particles and heat are expected. Moreover, with a suitable topological configuration, new quantum phases are also expected.

The chosen approach consists in exciting optically the atoms to a Rydberg state so as to take advantage of the dipole-dipole interaction between atoms and reach the strongly interacting regime. This approach will be developed on an existing platform where custom-shaped clouds of atoms in two dimensions of space can be tailored.

 

 

Dynamics of atoms confined in a one-dimensional channel is studied by connecting this channel to two reservoirs with fixed temperature T and chemical potential µ. The strongly interacting regime between atoms in the channel is obtained by dressing the atoms by a laser which weakly excites them into a Rydberg state |r>. Top left, picture of an atomic cloud in a similar configuration already obtained by the team.