Control of dissipative many-body dynamics in AMO quantum simulators

Over the past years there has been rapid development in the application of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical systems in developing platforms for Quantum Simulation. Quantum Simulators provide opportunities to explore many-body dynamics that are relevant both to our understanding of many-body physics, and have immediate connections to materials science.

However, they also provide opportunities for broader applications as analogue quantum computers, with the potential to shed new light on problems in quantum chemistry, and even computational problems in logistics and optimisation, with potential impact well beyond basic physics.

One of the biggest challenges for quantum simulators is decoherence that arises from noise and coupling of a quantum simulator to its environment. However, if properly understood, coupling to the environment can also be used to generate new tools for control of quantum systems. In recent years, interest has been growing in how to use usually unwanted decoherence properties both (1) to generate new many-body phenomena that are interesting on a fundmental level, and (2) to develop a new toolbox of control techniques for quantum simulators and their applications in developing next generations of other quantum technologies.

These control techniques can include new opportunities to encode different problems in quantum simulators, or the use of measurement and feedback techniques to drive the system into many-body states that can be useful for developing programmable quantum sensors.

In this project, we will address the control of many-body dynamics in quantum simulators, based around cold atoms in optical lattices, neutral atoms in tweezer arrays, and trapped ions. We will investigate both the basic physics of open many-body quantum systems (e.g., measurement-induced phase transitions and quantum feedback control in many-body systems), and exploration of dyanmics induced by dissipation, including quantum transport in cold atoms systems. The objectives will be:

1) To identify new many-body phenomena controlled by dissipation (e.g., transitions determined by the competition between coherent and dissipative dynamics or the strength of quantum feedback)

2) To perform analytical studies and extend numerical techniques to study these phenomena for realistic experimental settings, and 3) To identify potential applications of these phenomena in future quantum technologies.