Detail Project and Funding

Abstract: Recent progress in various areas of physics has demonstrated our ability to control quantum effects in customized systems and materials, thus paving the way for a promising future for quantum technologies.
However, the emergence of such quantum devices requires pursuing open scientific questions – both experimental and theoretical – to reinforce new applications and to provide innovative perspectives.
This project is dedicated to a subject that will be at the heart of quantum devices, namely the study and the control of out-of-equilibrium properties of quantum many-body systems.
Specifically, our consortium will focus on the behavior of quantum systems when they are driven across a phase transition.
A celebrated approach to understand relatively slow quenches around a phase transition is known as the Kibble-Zurek mechanism and has already been investigated in a wealth of different contexts.
The success of this rather simple paradigm hides many interesting open questions, both from a fundamental and an practical point of view, such as, for instance, the role of relaxation in such protocols.
Beyond this paradigmatic example, we will also investigate systems with long-range interactions, with different dimensionalities, and more complex quench protocols.
These studies are motivated by our will to improve the control of the time evolution of quantum systems, which is a crucial issue for initializing defect-free quantum states and operating in a robust way any quantum simulator.
To develop a comprehensive understanding of the behavior of quantum systems in the vicinity of the critical regime we will combine advanced experiments with ultracold quantum gases and innovative theoretical ideas of condensed-matter physics, quantum optics, statistical physics and quantum
information.
Quantum gases are a unique platform for providing model systems with the level of flexibility and control necessary for our ambitious goal.
Their cleanness and their robustness to decoherence will greatly enhance the efficient interplay between theory and experiments.
Finally, due to the interdisciplinary relevance of the problem of non-equilibrium dynamics addressed here, the outcomes of this project are expected to have a potentially wide scientific impact.

INO’s Experiments/Theoretical Study correlated:
Experiments with ultra-cold atoms: Study of defects across phase transitions

The Scientific Results:
1) Production of large Bose-Einstein condensates in a magnetic-shield-compatible hybrid trap
2) Dynamical equilibration across a quenched phase transition in a trapped quantum gas
3) Optical Visibility and Core Structure of Vortex Filaments in a Bosonic Superfluid
4) Quench dynamics of an ultracold two-dimensional Bose gas
5) Design and characterization of a compact magnetic shield for ultracold atomic gas experiments
6) Observation of Magnetic Solitons in Two-Component Bose-Einstein Condensates
7) Single-shot reconstruction of the density profile of a dense atomic gas
8) Measurement of the Canonical Equation of State of a Weakly Interacting 3D Bose Gas
9) Kibble-Zurek dynamics in a trapped ultracold Bose gas
10) Manipulation of an elongated internal Josephson junction of bosonic atoms
11) Quantum-torque-induced breaking of magnetic interfaces in ultracold gases
12) Measurement of the order parameter and its spatial fluctuations across Bose-Einstein condensation