Theory of ultracold quantum systems

Floquet engineering is a powerful technique which relies on the use of a periodic drive to design new Hamiltonians with tailored properties. While an intense activity is seeking to enable its use in many-body quantum systems in order to realize new types of strongly-correlated quantum states, heating and instabilities arising from the interplay between the interactions and the periodic drive have so far limited its potential. My postdoctoral work within the group of Nathan Goldman at ULB (Belgium) has shed light on the microscopic origin of those instabilities and permitted to build a formalism capable to ab initio determine stability diagrams and estimate instability rates – providing experimentalists with quantitative guidance towards stable regimes of operation. These pioneering works have led to two major international collaborations, with respectively MPQ Munich (I. Bloch) and NIST (T. Porto), leading to the experimental observation of the predicted behaviours.

Selected works: PRX 7, 021015 (2017), PRX 9, 011047 (2019), PRX 10, 011030 (2020)

My PhD works in the group of Alain Aspect at Institut d’Optique (France) focused on the understanding of collective behaviours in weakly-interacting disordered Bose gases. Through the combined use of analytical and numerical techniques, I investigated the properties of the ground-state (superfluid-glass transition) and collective excitations (transport and localization) of disordered Bose-Einstein condensates. Key results include the characterization of non-trivial localization transitions, with possible coexistence of extended and localized states, the development of a strong-disorder formalism, and a quantitative study of the quasiperiodic problem.

Selected works: PRA 90, 061602(R) (2014), PRA 92, 043611 (2015)