News

It was 30 years ago that the first BECs were created in alkali atoms. This was not only the culmination of decades of work and development, for instance in laser cooling, but was the beginning of our exciting and still-growing field!We congratulate and celebrate in this News & Views for Nature:Nature647, 860-861 (2025)

Topology in condensed matter physics refers to global properties of a system’s quantum states that remain stable under continuous deformations, like stretching or bending — but not tearing. Unlike conventional phases of matter, topological phases are protected by more abstract, global properties, such as Chern numbers. These properties are immune t…

Our work on observing the 2D Bose glass in our optical quasicrystal has been published in Nature:Observing the two-dimensional Bose glass in an optical quasicrystalJr-Chiun Yu, Shaurya Bhave, Lee reeve, Bo Song, Ulrich SchneiderNature 633, 338–343 (2024).Press release on the Department of Physics Webpage:Physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory in …

Optical lattices are power quantum simulators with many applications in e.g. strongly-correlated and topological systems. However, up to now, they were limited in programmability since typically all tunnelling links were of the same strength. In this new paper, we show theoretically how local control over individual tunnelling links can be achieve…

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting 85 scientists for our ICAP satellite conference on Cold Atoms and Molecules for Fundamental Physics in Cambridge.  Many thanks to all the speakers, poster presenters and participants for 3 days of inspiring discussions!Cold atoms and molecules for fundamental physics - ICAP satellite

Professor Ulrich Schneider received the IOP 2023 Joseph Thomson Medal and Prize for groundbreaking experiments on the collective dynamics of quantum gases in optical lattices, including fundamental studies of localization effects in both disordered and quasicrystalline systems.More information at:https://www.iop.org/about/awards/2023-joseph-thomson…

We have two experimental postdoc opportunities on many-body physics in Optical Quasicrystals and on being part of the UK Quantum Technology Hub and developing optical optical-lattice and tweezer-based Quantum Simulators.More information at:https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/41624/Applications close on 15/8/23.

Our latest work on observing the two-dimensional Bose glass in our optical quasicrystal is now on the Arxiv:  Arxiv:2303.00737. We could not only observe the Bose glass and the phase transition between Bose glass and superfluid, but could furthermore experimentally establish the non-ergodic character of the Bose glass. This opens new possibilitie…

Our latest work on  creating Hubbard Models for Quasicrystalline Potentials is now on the Arxiv (2210.05691). In it, we present a numerical method for constructing the Hubbard Hamiltonian of non-periodic potentials without making use of Bloch's theorem, and then apply it to the eightfold rotationally symmetric 2D optical quasicrystal we have creat…

The AION experiment reached an important first milestone with the UHV vacuum chamber having been delivered. Next stop: laser cooled Strontium.

Bryce Gadway wrote a News & Views article for Nature Physics on our paper on Realizing Discontionuous Phase Transitrions. Check it out:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01543-w  

In our lastest work we have used a resonantly driven optical lattice to turn the Mott transition into a first-order (discontinuous) transition. We were able to directly observe the associated hysteresis and metastability, where the system remains stuck in its original phase (the false vacuum) even though the ground state has changed.In contrast to …

Finally, we were able to hold teh first in-person collaboration of the new AION collaboration, where we want to develop large scale atom interferometers. 

We have two postdoctoral positions on experiments with ultracold atoms and optical lattices.In addition to our main experiments on Quantum Simulations in Optical Quasicrystals and a Kagome Quantum Gas Microscope, we are also starting a new activity on Atom Interferometry for detecting dark matter and gravitational waves.Current Postdoc opportunitie…

Our latest work on Observing localisation in a 2D quasicrystalline optical lattice was published today in PRL. Quasicrystals are long-range ordered but not periodic, representing an interesting middle ground between order and disorder. We experimentally and numerically study the localization transition in the ground state of noninteracting and weak…