Cold Atoms in Bordeaux

Since its early development in the beginning of the 20th century, the quantum theory has reached tremendous success in describing the microscopic world. As a ground breaking example this theory perfectly describes the behavior of single to a few atoms coupled to an electromagnetic (EM) field (2012 Nobel Prize). Despite this success, the full understanding of larger systems known as N body correlated systems still remains to be unveiled. This is particularly the case in low temperature electronic solid state systems for which the temperature is far below the Fermi temperature (T/TF<0.005). Such regime is still mostly understood but we expect that the dynamics of the system will be driven by quantum correlations.

Two-dimensional electron gases (2DEG) that consist of electrons moving in a single atomic layer belong to this class of un-understood N-bodies correlated systems. For the quantum physics and condensed matter communities, they represent a great interest that could enlighten the conduction properties of graphene, the behavior of cuprates and other high-Tc superconductors or the properties of edge states in topological insulators. In this framework, the development of ultra-cold atom control offers toy-model systems to study the quantum properties of matter. In our project, we develop such a type of 2D ultra-cold atom quantum simulator using a new, original and challenging hybrid quantum system made of ultra-cold atoms and near field nano-structured EM potentials. Compared to usual far-field simulators, our apparatus allows us to raise all the energy scale at play in the underlying phenomena (nowadays a limiting factor) and to engineer novel types of long range interactions and band diagrams that should unveil these complex quantum phases.