Assembling Fermionic Quantum Systems Atom by Atom

by Dr Naman Jain (Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany)

Wednesday 21 Oct 2026, 11:30 → 12:30 Asia/Kolkata

AG 80 and on zoom

Exercising precise control over quantum systems could offer a complementary route to many-body physics: rather than inferring microscopic mechanisms from collective behaviour, we can prepare a system with a known microscopic structure and study how its properties emerge. Realizing this experimentally requires control over all the relevant degrees of freedom of an atomic ensemble – including particle number, spin, motional state, and position.

In this talk, I will present a new-generation fermionic quantum gas microscope platform that achieves these objectives, enabling the prospects of assembling quantum systems from the bottom-up using lithium-6. Specifically, I will talk about our recent results demonstrating high-fidelity preparation of programmable spin and charge patterns across an 8x8 two-dimensional optical tweezer array of up to 128 atoms, deterministically in the motional ground state. This is complemented by a single-exposure imaging scheme that provides spin-, site- and density-resolved detection of these atomic ensembles at microsecond timescales with high fidelity. I will discuss how these capabilities of programmable initialization and ultrafast detection, would provide a unique vantage point for the exploration of nonequilibrium many-body physics in itinerant systems. I will also briefly present our recent results from tunnel-coupling these product states prepared in tweezers, where coherent evolution offers a first step towards analog–digital hybrid approaches to studying quantum dynamics and realizing fermionic quantum processing architectures.