Ultracold molecules arranged in precise grids will act as stand-ins for electrons in exotic materials that are too complex to study directly. The problem is that many of the most intriguing phenomena in physics—like high-temperature superconductivity or the fractional quantum Hall effect—emerge from the collective behaviour of strongly interacting particles. Simulating these systems on a conventional computer is effectively impossible. This project builds artificial quantum materials from ultracold rubidium-cesium molecules, whose long-range interactions and sensitivity to electric fields make them far more controllable than real electrons in a solid. If successful, the work will let researchers probe the origins of topological phases and quantum magnetism in a programmable, observable setting. The team will also demonstrate a molecular qudit—a quantum unit with more than two states—and implement the Deutsch algorithm, a foundational quantum computing routine. This is fundamental science: there is no immediate practical application. But the same kind of curiosity-driven work that first trapped and cooled atoms later enabled atomic clocks that underpin GPS and financial networks. A deeper understanding of strongly correlated quantum matter could, in time, inform the design of new superconductors or quantum sensors.
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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.
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