We report the realisation of bright matter-wave solitons and the creation of ultracold RbCs molecules using quantum degenerate gases in combination with magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances with a view to exploring applications in many-body physics.
This article gives an introduction to the realization of effective quantum magnetism with ultracold molecules in an optical lattice, reviews experimental and theoretical progress, and highlights future opportunities opened up by ongoing experiments. Ultracold molecules offer capabilities that are otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve in other effective spin systems, such as long-ranged spin-spin interactions with controllable degrees of spatial and spin anisotropy and favorable energy scales. Realizing quantum magnetism with ultracold molecules provides access to rich many-body behaviors, including many exotic phases of matter and interesting excitations and dynamics. Far-from-equilibrium dynamics plays a key role in our exposition, just as it did in recent ultracold molecule experiments realizing effective quantum magnetism. In particular, we show that dynamical probes allow the observation of correlated many-body spin physics, even in polar molecule gases that are not quantum degenerate. After describing how quantum magnetism arises in ultracold molecules and discussing recent observations of quantum magnetism with polar molecules, we survey prospects for the future, ranging from immediate goals to long-term visions.
Feshbach resonances are the essential tool to control the interaction between atoms in ultracold quantum gases. They have found numerous experimental applications, opening up the way to important breakthroughs. This review broadly covers the phenomenon of Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases and their main applications. This includes the theoretical background and models for the description of Feshbach resonances, the experimental methods to find and characterize the resonances, a discussion of the main properties of resonances in various atomic species and mixed atomic species systems, and an overview of key experiments with atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, degenerate Fermi gases, and ultracold molecules.
Besides the enormous opportunities offered by spectroscopy and atom interferometry, laser cooling has opened up the possibility of experimentally realizing and manipulating quantum degenerate gases: Bose–Einstein condensates and degenerate Fermionic systems. This chapter starts with an illustration of key experimental techniques, such as magnetic trapping, evaporative cooling, and Feshbach resonances. It then turns to the physics of atomic Bose–Einstein condensates, discussing their superfluid behaviour, their coherence properties, and their application to precise measurements. It also describes the experimental investigation of ultracold Fermi gases and fermionic superfluidity, as well as ongoing research into ultracold polar molecules.
The topic of the present lecture notes are two-species quantum mixtures composed of a deeply degenerate Fermi gas and a second component, the latter being fermionic or bosonic. A key ingredient is the possibility to tune the s-wave interaction between the different species by means of magnetically controlled Feshbach resonances, which allow us to investigate regimes of strong interactions. In two case studies, we review our experiments on mixtures of 6Li fermions with fermionic 40K or bosonic 41K atoms and on mixtures of fermionic 161Dy with 40K atoms. We cover various topics of fermionic quantum many-body physics, ranging from impurity physics and quasiparticles over phase separation to the formation of ultracold molecules and progress towards novel superfluids.