Hybrid atom-ion quantum systems
Hybrid atom-ion systems represent a new and excellent platform to explore new physics that the two systems separately would not permit. For instance, the investigation of ultracold elastic and inelastic atom-ion collisions and controlled chemical reactions, but also the realisation of quantum information processing, where the advantages of charged and neutral particles are combined. In addition to this, atom-ion systems are very suited to simulate condensed-matter systems and Fröhlich polaron Hamiltonians more closely, where, for example, the charge-phonon, an important ingredient of solid-state systems, is naturally mimicked in such hybrid atomic system.
Our group is interested in this emerging research field in a twofold manner: On one side we are interested to engineer many-body Hamiltonians such that phenomena like Peierls instability and superconductivity can be realised in atomic laboratories. On the other hand, we aim at a microscopic and detailed understanding of many-body interactions and correlations in such hybrid systems by performing (exact) numerical simulations via the multi-layer multi-configurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons that has been recently developed in our group.