Follow Roman Bause, Postdoc (former PhD) at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, to his quantum gas lab, where he and his group cool small molecules down to the lowest temperatures ever reached, only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. The group creates degenerate dipolar quantum gases of NaK ground state molecules starting from an ultracold mixture of sodium and potassium atoms. Their strong and anisotropic long-ranged interaction allows to investigate the rich physics of dipolar many-body systems in a strongly-interacting regime. Currently the group are following particularly two research topics:
I. One is understanding and controlling collisions of molecules to remove entropy from the Fermionic molecular gas. We already have the coldest dipolar ground state molecules and are still trying to make the system colder.
II. The other is to simulate novel spin models and extended Hubbard model beyond nearest-neighbor interactions by trapping the molecules in an optical lattice.
The big goal: use the ultracold polar molecules to simulate so far unsolvable problems in the understanding of materials (like superconductivity) and in other systems where quantum effects play a larger role.
15 сен 2024
