Aug 19, 2020 (Wed.) at 3PM (EST)
Understanding the behavior of interacting electrons in solids or liquids is at the heart of modern quantum science and necessary for technological advances. However, the complexity of their interactions generally prevents us from coming up with an exact mathematical description of their behavior. Precisely engineered ultracold gases are emerging as a powerful tool for unraveling these challenging physical problems. In this talk, I will present recent developments at JILA using alkaline-earth atoms (AEAs) --currently the basis of the most precise atomic clock in the world-- for the investigation of complex many-body phenomena and magnetism. I will discuss how to use AEAs dressed by laser fields to engineer analogs of spin-orbit coupled Hamiltonians and explore rich physics emerging from the interplay between many-body interactions and spin-orbit coupling in a fermionic optical lattice clock. In particular I will explain how local interactions in the Hubbard model in the presence of spin-orbit coupling, can generate spin-locking, prolong inter-particle spin coherence, and transform dephasing effects into an entangling process. These investigations fall into the new paradigm of using driven, non-equilibrium many-body systems to advance quantum metrology.