Parkins, Scott

Date:  Thursday, September 19, 2017
Time:  11:00
Place:  ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HPF G 6
Host:   Atac Imamoglu

Cavity QED engineering of spin dynamics and squeezing in a spinor gas

Scott Parkins
Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic & Quantum Technologies,
Department of Physics, University of Auckland, New Zealand

I describe a proposal for engineering spin dynamics in ensembles of integer-spin atoms confined within a high-finesse optical cavity. The proposal uses cavity-assisted Raman transitions to engineer a Dicke model for integer-spin atoms, which, in a dispersive limit, reduces to effective atom-atom interactions within the ensemble. This scheme offers a promising and flexible new avenue for the exploration of a wide range of spinor many-body physics. As an example of this, I present theoretical results showing that this method should be able to generate strong spin-nematic squeezing in an ensemble of spin-1 atoms on time scales much shorter than current experiments with spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates.