News

This conference aims to bring together mathematical physicists, theoretical physicists, and experimentalists interested in the effects of quasiperiodicity and fractality in quantum physics. Recent progress in controlling quasiperiodic systems in ultracold atom setups has been significant. The discovery of moiré materials and their realization in gr…

A major grant of £1.2 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is funding Sensing the Earth with a novel QUantum-classical INterferometer array (SEQUIN), an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Many-Body Quantum Dynamics Group at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, and the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford. The pro…

We are pleased to announce a Kavli Science Focus Meeting on “Cosmology in the Lab”, which will take place 09.30–17.15 on Thurs 26 and Fri 27 March 2026 in the Cluster Room at the Ray Dolby Centre.Rapid developments in quantum technologies are unlocking new ways of probing cosmology and fundamental physics using tabletop-scale quantum experiments. T…

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 …