Abstract
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in creating complex atomic
many-body quantum systems. One approach is to use macroscopic, effectively
thermodynamic ensembles of ultracold atoms to create quantum gases and strongly
correlated states of matter, and to analyze the bulk properties of the
ensemble. The opposite approach is to build up microscopic quantum systems atom
by atom - with complete control over all degrees of freedom. Until now, the
macroscopic and microscopic strategies have been fairly disconnected. Here, we
present a "quantum gas microscope" that bridges the two approaches, realizing a
system where atoms of a macroscopic ensemble are detected individually and a
complete set of degrees of freedom of each of them is determined through
preparation and measurement. By implementing a high-resolution optical imaging
system, single atoms are detected with near-unity fidelity on individual sites
of a Hubbard regime optical lattice. The lattice itself is generated by
projecting a holographic mask through the imaging system. It has an arbitrary
geometry, chosen to support both strong tunnel coupling between lattice sites
and strong on-site confinement. On one hand, this new approach can be used to
directly detect strongly correlated states of matter. On the other hand, the
quantum gas microscope opens the door for the addressing and read-out of
large-scale quantum information systems with ultracold atoms.
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