Pairing of nucleons is a well-known property of nuclei and nucleonic matter and the mechanism driving nuclear superfluidity. While it bears a connection to the fermionic superfluidity encountered in terrestrial superconductors, various aspects of nuclear superfluidity are unique holding unanswered questions: Does the analogue of triplet superfluidity exist for neutron-proton pairs in nuclei? Can opposite parity order parameters coexist in nucleonic systems? What are the properties of the superfluid state in weakly bound states? Are these effects unique to nuclear systems? I will present new theoretical results in these directions, using a mix of phenomenological and ab initio many-body methods, and connect them to two recent precision mass measurement with TITAN at TRIUMF. Finally, in this talk I also intend to discuss other works, notably recent attempts to refine the description of microscopic three-nucleon forces.

Enabling communication between quantum devices, such as clocks, computers, and simulators has the potential to significantly enhance the capabilities of their applications, such as quantum sensing and computing. The key to achieving this lies in establishing efficient communication channels among these quantum devices even over a long distance, which involves the exchange of qubits encoded in light at telecom wavelengths through optical fibers. In this context, I will present an overview of the new experiment that we are building in Florence, which focuses on interfacing single photons at telecom wavelengths with individual neutral ytterbium atoms trapped in optical tweezers. By leveraging the unique properties of the ytterbium clock state and its telecom transitions, our objective is to interface a long-lived ”matter” qubit and resonant light, including atom-resonant heralded single photons or photons forming entangled pairs. I will discuss the first developments, the motivation for exploring this research line and its impact as a crucial foundation for distributing entanglement between light and matter.

TBA

The ab initio approach to nuclear structure allows us to describe atomic nuclei with controlled and systematically improvable approximations. Applying it to nuclei that are at the same time both heavy and open-shell is largely impossible with current many-body techniques. This is due to the computational cost of handling huge dense tensors. 

I will show how some surprisingly simple tricks may help us to tackle this hurdle. These tricks are driven by the observation that different contributions to ab initio calculations describe different physics. We leverage this by using adapted model spaces. 

In addition, we use modern linear algebra methods to develop dimensionality reduction techniques based on the singular value decomposition. By avoiding the construction of large many-body tensors in the first place, we are able to extend the reach of ab initio calculations to nuclei where standard approaches would be too expensive to run.