Pathbreaking Platform for Quantum Simulation: A Metal-Like Quantum Gas
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? 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 of ultracold atoms (see Figure 1). The experiment was performed with an ensemble of 30,000 rubidium atoms in the gas phase. Those ultracold atoms in the energetically lowest quantum state, referred to as a Bose-Einstein condensate4), are loaded into a cubic lattice of optical traps formed with counter-propagating laser beams, resulting in an artificial micro-crystal consisting of 30,000 atoms, whose nearest neighbor distance is 0.5 micron.
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