Condensed matter physics: Artificial interaction

Immanuel Bloch

The tutorial will focus on the remarkable opportunities offered by ultracold quantum gases trapped in optical lattices to address fundamental physics questions ranging from condensed matter physics over statistical physics to high energy physics with table-top experiment.

Stephen William Lovesey

Michael Levin, Xiao-Gang Wen

Recent advances in condensed-matter theory have revealed that new and exotic phases of matter can exist in spin models (or more precisely, local bosonic models) via a simple physical mechanism, known as ``string-net condensation.'' These new phases of matter have the unusual property that their collective excitations are gauge bosons and fermions. In some cases, the collective excitations can behave just like the photons, electrons, gluons, and quarks in our vacuum. This suggests that photons, electrons, and other elementary particles may have a unified origin---string-net condensation in our vacuum. In addition, the string-net picture indicates how to make artificial photons, artificial electrons, and artificial quarks and gluons in condensed-matter systems.

Valdir C. Aguilera-Navarro

Sebastian Schmidt

Abstract Artificially engineered light–matter systems constitute a novel, versatile architecture for the quantum simulation of driven, dissipative phase transitions and non-equilibrium quantum many-body systems. Here, we discuss recent experimental as well as theoretical works on the simulation of geometrical frustration in interacting photonic systems out of equilibrium. In particular, we review two recent discoveries at the interface of quantum optics and condensed matter physics: (i) the experimental achievement of Bosonic condensation into a flat energy band and (ii) the theoretical prediction of crystalline phases of light in a frustrated qubit-cavity array. We show that this new line of research leads to novel and unique tools for the experimental investigation of frustrated systems and holds the potential to create new phases of light and matter with interesting spatial structure.

Jaime Merino, A. Levy Yeyati