Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Quantum materials hold the promise for groundbreaking technologies making use of strongly correlated many-body states of matter. However, harnessing their potential is a challenging task. Ultracold atomic systems offer the possibility to design a quantum system with well-known microscopic properties, and are highly controllable. Hybrid systems involving multiple species are considerably more complex, which can increase the variety of simulable systems but introduces additional challenges. I will discuss two systems which are especially promising: ion-atom and Rydberg-ground state mixtures, highlighting their ability to access polaron physics in the regime of strong and long-ranged interactions.