Monika Schleier Smith

The dream of the quantum engineer is to have an “arbitrary waveform generator” for designing quantum states and Hamiltonians. Motivated by this vision, I will report on advances in optical control of long-range interactions among cold atoms. By coupling atoms to light in an optical resonator, we induce tunable non-local spin-spin interactions, characterizing the resulting dynamics by real-space imaging. Notably, in a spin-1 system, we observe photon-mediated spin mixing, a new mechanism for producing correlated atom pairs. In a separate platform, we employ Rydberg dressing to induce Ising interactions in a dilute gas of cesium atoms in their hyperfine clock states, enabling the realization of a Floquet transverse-field Ising model. I will discuss prospects in quantum simulation and quantum metrology promised by the versatility of optical control.[1] Ar-39 dating with small samples provides new key constraints on ocean ventilation, Nature Comm. 9, 5046 (2018).[2] Observation of universal dynamics in a spinor Bose gas far from equilibrium, Nature 563, 217 (2018).