Pathbreaking Platform for Quantum Simulation: A Metal-Like Quantum Gas [Video]

Electronic properties of condensed matter are often determined by an intricate competition between kinetic energy that aims to overlap and delocalize electronic wave functions across the crystal lattice, and localizing electron-electron interactions. In contrast, the gaseous phase is characterized by valence electrons tightly localized around the ionic atom cores in discrete quantum states with well-defined energies.

As an exotic hybrid of both situations, one may wonder which state of matter is created when a gas of isolated atoms is suddenly excited to a state where electronic wave functions spatially overlap like in a solid? Such an exotic phase of matter, however, has so far been impossible to be created in principle.

Here, Professor Kenji Ohmori, Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Japan, and his coworkers have realized such an exotic hybrid with overlapping high-lying electronic (Rydberg1)) wave-functions created coherently within only 10 picoseconds (pico = one trillionth) by ultrafast laser excitation in an artificial micro-crystal …