Researchers at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, have discovered that their strontium atomic clock can simulate quantum magnetism. The clock, made of about 2,000 neutral strontium atoms, was originally designed to measure time with extreme precision. However, researchers found that under certain conditions, the atoms interacted like those in magnetic materials, allowing them to simulate quantum systems.
The atomic clock’s ability to simulate quantum magnetism was discovered accidentally while researchers were trying to eliminate interactions between the atoms, which are undesirable in atomic clocks. However, these interactions can be harnessed to create a powerful quantum simulator. The strontium atoms were arranged in a stack of 100 pancakes, each containing about 20 atoms. When exposed to specific laser pulses, the atoms entered a superposition of spins pointing both up and down, and their interactions led to correlations and potential entanglement.
The discovery opens up new possibilities for using atomic clocks as quantum simulators to study complex quantum systems, such as high-temperature superconductors, which are difficult to simulate on classical computers. The research is supported by NIST, DARPA, AFOSR, NSF, and ARO.
Keywords: Atomic, Entanglement, Quantum, Simulation, Superposition
