The micro­scopic descrip­tion of a multi­tude of exotic phenom­ena such as magnet­ism or high-temper­a­ture super­con­duc­tiv­ity still raises questions. This project deals with the simula­tion of these phenom­ena using a quantum gas micro­scope. In this project, ultra­cold fermi­onic lithium atoms are made to behave identi­cally to electrons in a solid state by controlled optical light fields. By using a high-resolu­tion fluores­cence image, the behav­iour of each individ­ual atom can be observed.

A rich variety of phenom­ena in solid state systems such as quantum magnet­ism or high temper­a­ture super­con­duc­tiv­ity still pose open questions on parts of their micro­scopic expla­na­tion. Due to the complex­ity of these systems, the under­ly­ing quantum many-body dynam­ics is often not acces­si­ble to compu­ta­tional simula­tion. Fermi­onic Quantum Gas Micro­scopes resolve the spin and density of single lattice sites in quantum gas exper­i­ments and repre­sent an novel platform to simulate condensed matter phenom­ena. In these exper­i­ments, atoms cooled to the quantum regime are manip­u­lated by light fields to gener­ate optical lattices and finally mimic solid state systems in which the inter­act­ing fermi­onic atoms replace the electrons.

This project is carried out in the Lithium Quantum Gas Micro­scope exper­i­ment of Hector Fellow Immanuel Bloch. It aims at moving towards quantum simula­tion of the Fermi Hubbard model, topolog­i­cal edge states in super­lat­tices and the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchin­nikov phase in spin imbal­anced systems. Our setup has the unique feature to simul­ta­ne­ously resolve spins, doubly occupied sites and holes at the same time. Recently, one of the first single site resolved images of fermi­onic atoms in optical lattices was realized. A new super­lat­tice gener­a­tion will be imple­mented to reach lower entropies, increase the system size and to reach higher energy scales.