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For the past several years, an experimental research group led by��JILA Fellow James Thompson and a theoretical research group led by JILA Fellow Ana Maria Rey have been working together to study quantum interactions using cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED)—the science of how light contained in reflective cavities interacts with quantum particles, like individual atoms. Recently, they tackled many-body interactions with a new experiment, described in an article published in the journal Science. In the experiment, they successfully created interactions that require the participation of either three or four atoms to achieve the observed results.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a $625 million investment to advance the next phase of the National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, a cornerstone of the National Quantum Initiative. This funding will support five centers dedicated to accelerating quantum technologies that promise transformative impacts on science, industry, and national security. JILA is proud to remain a key partner in QSA through the Q-SEnSE Center, which focuses on quantum sensing and precision measurement.

In a new theoretical study, physicists at JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder have proposed a way to make the most precise clocks in the world even more robust—by weaving in the strange, protective properties of topological physics. Their work, published in PRX Quantum, explores how a class of quantum states known as symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases could be used to improve the performance of optical lattice clocks, a cornerstone of modern precision measurement.

In a recent study published in Science, by JILA and NIST Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder physics professors Jun Ye and Ana Maria Rey, interactions between atoms are explored in depth, focusing on superexchange processes that occur in a three-dimensional optical lattice.

The strange behaviors of high-temperature superconductors—materials that conduct electricity without resistance above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen—and other systems with unusual magnetic properties have fascinated scientists for decades. While researchers have developed mathematical models for these systems, much of the underlying quantum dynamics and phases remain a mystery because of the immense computational difficulty of solving these models.

Researchers at JILA, led by Ana Maria Rey, developed a new protocol for teleporting quantum information in collective spin states of ions within a two-dimensional crystal. This involves entangling ion groups through phonon modes and using measurements to transfer quantum states. The protocol, successfully simulated with up to 300 ions, shows potential for quantum networks and distributed quantum sensing.

Researchers led by JILA and NIST Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder physics professors Jun Ye and Ana Maria Rey—in collaboration with scientists at the Leibnitz University in Hanover, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Innsbruck—proposed practical protocols to explore the effects of relativity, such as the gravitational redshift, on quantum entanglement and interactions in an optical atomic clock. Their work revealed that the interplay between gravitational effects and quantum interactions can lead to unexpected phenomena, such as atomic synchronization and quantum entanglement among particles.

In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters, Rey and JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson, along with graduate student Sanaa Agarwal and researcher Asier Piñeiro Orioli from the University of Strasbourg, studied atom-light interactions in the case of effective four-level atoms, two ground (or metastable) and two excited levels arranged in specific one-dimensional and two-dimensional crystal lattices.

Recent research at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry and the Institut d’Optique in Paris studied a collection of atoms in free space forming an elongated, pencil-shaped cloud and reported the potential observation of this desired phase transition. Yet, the results of this study puzzled other experimentalists since atoms in free space don’t easily synchronize.

To better understand these findings, JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and her theory team collaborated with an international team of experimentalists. The theorists found that atoms in free space can only partially synchronize their emission, suggesting that the free-space experiment did not observe the superradiant phase transition. These results are published in PRX Quantum.

JILA and NIST Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder Physics professors Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson and their teams wanted to guide the community on which protocol is best to use under fundamental and realistic experimental conditions. Their results, published in Physical Review Research, revealed that when measurement efficiency is greater than 19%, the QND measurement protocol outperformed unitary dynamical evolution. This finding can have big implications for quantum metrology.