Dear all,

today, Selim Jochim from Heidelberg is visiting us and will give a talk at 11:30 in HIT F 32 about

One, two, three, many: Exploring quantum systems one atom at a time

Experiments with ultracold gases have been extremely successful in studying

many body systems, such as Bose Einstein condensates or fermionic

superfluids. These are deep in the regime of statistical physics, where

adding or removing an individual particle does not matter.

For a few-body system this can be dramatically different. This is apparent

for example in nuclear physics, where adding a single neutron to a magic

nucleus dramatically changes its properties. In our work we

deterministically prepare generic model systems containing up to ten

ultracold fermionic atoms with tunable short range interaction.

In our bottom-up approach, we have started the exploration of such few-body

systems with a two-particle system that can be described with an analytic

theory. Adding more particles one by one we enter a regime in which an exact

theoretical description of the system is exceedingly difficult, until the

particle number becomes large enough such that many-body theories provide an

adequate approximation.

best, Matthias.