SimPoMol: Quantum Simulation with Ultracold Polar Molecules

Strongly-interacting many-body quantum states lie at the heart of phenomena such as the fractional quantum Hall effect, high-temperature superconductivity and exotic forms of magnetism. Understanding how these phenomena emerge is often computationally intractable and remains one of the great challenges of modern physics. A promising route to conquering this challenge is to use a highly controllable artificial quantum system to simulate the physics believed to underpin the behaviour observed in more complex, real materials.

The goal of SimPoMol is to synthesise and study artificial quantum materials using ultracold RbCs molecules arranged in regular arrays in order to probe novel quantum phenomena in strongly interacting quantum systems. The use of molecules is motivated by their rich internal structure, combined with the existence of controllable long-range dipole-dipole interactions, long trap lifetimes and strong coupling to electric and microwave fields.

We will use three experimental platforms, each leveraging our established expertise in the study of RbCs molecules, to go beyond the current state-of-the-art: bulk molecular gases, molecules assembled in arrays of optical tweezers and a quantum gas microscope for molecules in 2D optical lattices. We will engineer long rotational coherence times using rotationally-magic traps, allowing access to dipole-dipole interactions between molecules. We will exploit the rotational structure of molecules as a synthetic dimension to simulate archetypal models of topological materials and study new many-body phases in 1D chains of interacting molecules. We will demonstrate a molecular qudit encoding of the Deutsch algorithm and implement highfidelity quantum gates between molecules. Finally, we will develop single site imaging and addressing of molecules in lattices and use this powerful tool to probe the emergence of strongly correlated quantum
phases and explore quantum magnetism in our artificial materials.