Physics Club: Ben Lev, Stanford University, “Playing with quantum toys: Atomic Newton’s cradles & Archimedes’ screws”

Long-lived excited states of interacting quantum systems that retain quantum correlations and evade thermalization are of great fundamental interest. We describe recent experiments that show how one-dimensional quantum gases can serve as testbeds for exploring this physics by virtue of their proximity to integrability. Strangely, dipolar interactions among the atoms can induce chaotic dynamics, breaking integrability, while also stabilizing thermalization-evading “scar” states. The latter are accessed through an unusual energy-space topological pump arising from a quantum holonomy.
Host: Nir Navon (nir.navon@yale.edu)