Research

Ytterbium: a resourceful alkaline-earth-like atom

Ytterbium, as an alkaline-earth-like atom (AEA), features a rich electronic level stucture, offering many advantages over alkali atoms. Diverse optical transitions are available: a broad dipole-allowed transition at 399 nm enables efficient Zeeman slowing and fast laser cooling, a narrow intercombination transition at 556 nm can be leveraged to reach temperatures down to a few microKelvin by Doppler cooling, and an ultra-narrow clock transition can be used for metrological-grade spectroscopy and interferometry. The nuclear spin sub-states of the 1S0 ground and 3P0 clock states are ideal for encoding quantum information, owing to their weak sensitivity to external magnetic and electric fields, and to their SU(N) collisional symmetry, which increases the flexibility of quantum information and quantum simmulation schemes.

With novel ytterbium atom platforms, we aim at pursuing different research directions in quantum science and technologies, from fundamental few- and many-body physics and quantum simulation to quantum optics and quantum metrology.

Fermionic matter from a bottom up perspective

We study fermionic impurity problems and fermionic many-body systems combining microscopy with Ramsey interferometry.

Quantum optics and quantum metrology

We explore light-atom interactions in atom arrays exploiting ytterbium's rich level structure.

Quantum interconnects and modular computing

We build a modular architecture with programmable qubit control, uninterrupted operations and a quantum interconnect providing atom-photon entanglement generation mediated by an optical cavity