Physics

Dr. Prasanna Venkatesh
University of Innsbruck, Austria

The dispersive interaction of ultracold atoms with laser light has been exploited to make optical lattice-cold atom systems that serve as clean and controllable 'quantum simulators' of a variety of solid state systems . When such a laser light field is replaced by the single mode light field inside a coherently driven cavity, the resulting coupled light-atom system can show very interesting behaviour due to the dynamical back action of the atoms on the light field, which can be large inside a cavity unlike free space. After introducing this fast emerging addition to the quantum simulation toolbox, I will present a few results of our work so far in this field focusing mainly on Bloch oscillations of atoms in optical cavities.