Wolfgang Ketterle (Nobel laureate 2001) - MIT, USA

Atomic Quantum gases

My three lectures will cover three paradigmatic many-body systems realized with ultracold atoms:  Bose-Einstein condensation, optical lattices and the superfluid to Mott insulator transition, and the BEC-BCS crossover with fermions.

The material will be presented at the level of a graduate course in atomic physics.  The lectures combine discussions of experimental studies with theoretical methods.  The emphasis is on conceptual understanding of the properties of quantum gases.

[Slides]

Paul Julienne - University of Maryland, USA

Lecture 1: Cold Collision Basics

This lecture describes how to describe cold collisions quantum mechanically, focusing on the scattering and bound state properties near a collision threshold that are relevant to cold atom studies.  The all-important concept of the scattering length will be illustrated, as well as the role of the long range potential between two interacting atoms.

Lecture 2: Feshbach Resonances

Magnetically tunable scattering resonances known as Feshbach resonances permit the control of the interactions of cold bosonic or fermionic atoms and have been essential to the multidisciplinary fruitfulness of cold atom studies.  This lecture shows how to understand such resonances, using examples of magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances that have been successfully used in experimental work.

Lecture 3: Other Topics in Cold Collisions

The lecture series concludes by exploring some additional topics that are relevant to current research areas.  These include the existence of universal scattering properties of reactive and inelastic collisions, the effect of reduced dimension, or tight quantum confinement on atomic and molecular collisions, and the chaotic dynamics of complex atoms or molecules.

[Slides1] [Slides2] [Slides3]

Peter Zoller - University of Innsbruck, Austria

Quantum Simulation with Quantum Optical Systems

I will give two lectures introducing the topic of quantum simulation of quantum many-body systems with quantum optical systems from a theory perspective, and with emphasis of recent and modern developments. In the first lecture I will discuss atoms in optical lattices as quantum simulation of (closed) Hamiltonian systems, and the corresponding atomic toolbox. As a special topic - motivated by ongoing experimental efforts - I will add a part on the quantum gas microscope and applications, and in particular discuss protocols for measuring entanglement entropy. 
 The second lecture will be devoted to open quantum system simulation, as a driven-dissipative quantum many body system far from equilibrium. I will introduce the concept of open quantum systems and master equations, and discuss quantum reservoir engineering. We will illustrate open quantum system simulation in the context of ‘chiral quantum optics’ - again motivated by ongoing experiments. Here atoms are coupled to photonic nanostructure with the generic feature that photon emission into the waveguide has a broken left-right symmetry due to spin-orbit coupling of light. This results in a rather unconventional many-body quantum system with ‘non-reciprocal’ (unidirectional) photon-mediated interactions between atoms. We will discuss the underlying theoretical concepts and techniques to describe, and point to new phenomena and applications of such ‘chiral’ quantum many-body systems, and as quantum networks, where nodes are connected by chiral quantum channels.

[Slides1] [Slides2]

Myungshik Kim - KIAS and Imperial College London, UK

Light fields have been closely connected to the test of paradoxical ideas in quantum mechanics. Building Schroedinger cat states and testing the principles of quantum mechanics have been realised in photonic systems. Recently there have been considerable interests in the generation and manipulation of the quantum-mechanical states of nano-mechanical oscillators which are massive objects by the quantum-mechanical standard.  The two very different physical systems are described by the same mathematical tools as the both bear the bosonic statistics. In these lectures, we show some of the basic tools and methods to manipulate bosonic quantum systems.

Yvan Castin - Laboratoire Kastler Brossel of ENS, France

Strongly interacting Fermi gases

The system under consideration is a gas of spin-1/2 fermions with interactions of negligible range between opposite spin particles, characterised by the s-wave scattering length a. The intermediate regime between the Bose-Einstein-condensate-of-dimers limit (a tends to zero from above) and the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer limit (a tends to zero from below) is currently under experimental and theoretical investigation. We shall first present basic theory tools for this system, the BCS theory (including its time dependent version) and the Random Phase Approximation of Anderson. We shall then present several applications of these tools to the study of fundamental questions, such as (i) the Landau critical velocity of an object moving in the zero-temperature gas of fermions, and (ii) the coherence time of the condensate of pairs in a gas initially prepared at nonzero temperature and isolated from the environment in its further evolution.  In a second part, we shall concentrate on the unitary gas case (1/a=0), where the scaling symmetry opens the door for new physical phenomena such as the four-body Efimov effect, and helps theorists meet the challenge of calculating the recently measured fourth-order cluster (or virial) coefficient.

[Slides]

Jungsang Kim - Duke University, USA

Quantum Computing with Trapped Ions

Lecture 1: Trapped Ion Qubit Basics

This lecture will discuss the physical representation of qubits using trapped atomic ions, and their potential advantages and drawbacks. I will explain typical mechanisms used for the initialization, measurement, quantum logic gates and photonic interconnect protocols widely used in trapped ions. I will review several experimental efforts on cutting-edge implementation of quantum logic gate operations from various research groups around the world.

Lecture 2: Quantum Computing with Trapped Ions

This lecture will discuss the advanced architectures for realizing quantum computers using trapped ions. Based on the basic protocols described in the first lecture, I will describe unique opportunities for realizing scalable quantum computers using this technology. The connectivity between the qubits available in the trapped ion system provides tremendous advantage in implementing complex quantum algorithms in this system. I will describe some examples of architecture-dependent performance of quantum algorithms in trapped ion quantum computation.

[Slides]

(Short Course) Hanhee Paik - IBM T J Watson Research Center, USA

Introduction to superconducting qubits and Quantum Experience: a 5-qubit quantum processor in the cloud.

In this 2-day session, I will overview the basics of superconducting qubits: Josephson junction, a circuit model, circuit QED, coherence, and a control and measurement. Then I will introduce Quantum Experience, a 5-qubit superconducting qubit in the cloud that IBM recently lunched for research and education purposes. Anyone can register from the webpage https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net for an access. We will walk through the official tutorial in the Quantum Experience website together and play a few demo quantum codes during the session.

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