Ramanujan Auditorium

Emulating strong correlation using ultracold atoms

Krishnendu Sengupta

IACS Kolkata

Ultracold atoms placed in optical lattices are well known emulators of 
bosonic and spin Hamiltonians. Thus they provide us with clean experimental platforms
for studying both ground states and quantum dynamics of several paradigmatic 
models of strongly correlated bosons or spins. In this talk, I shall provide a pedagogical
introduction to these systems focussing on quantum phase transitions observed experimentally 
using several such platforms. These  include ultracold bosons placed in a tilted optical 
lattice and arrays and ladders Rydberg atoms where such transitions are both 
theoretically predicted and experimentally observed.