Researchers at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, have made a breakthrough in understanding the complex interactions between multiple atoms in quantum systems. By precisely measuring the behavior of groups of a few atoms within an atomic clock, they have provided the first quantitative evidence of multi-particle interactions in fermionic systems.
The research, published in Nature, demonstrates that when three or more atoms are packed together, their interactions produce unexpected nonlinear effects that cannot be predicted by simply summing up individual pair interactions. These multi-particle effects could potentially be harnessed to improve the performance of atomic clocks, sensors, and quantum information systems.
The JILA team used their three-dimensional strontium lattice clock to create arrays of between one and five atoms per lattice cell. They observed that when three or more atoms were present, the clock’s frequency shifted in ways that couldn’t be explained by pairwise interactions alone. The researchers also found that packing three or more atoms into a cell could result in long-lived, highly entangled states, which could be useful for quantum information processing.
This breakthrough could pave the way for developing new quantum technologies that leverage the complex interactions between multiple particles, potentially leading to significant improvements in the precision and capabilities of quantum-based systems.
Keywords: Quantum, atoms, interactions, entangled, metrology
