Program Manager: Jamil
R. Abo-Shaeer, Ph.D.
 The materials used for electronics components in "everyday" modern devices are governed by quantum physics. Quantum mechanics has enabled adequate explanations of the conduction of electrons in devices and the emission of photons from light-emitting diodes. The ability to understand and explain these properties has led to widespread exploitation of electronic materials; however, fully quantum mechanical treatments, as when electrons are entangled with one another, remain completely intractable, and so these effects are largely ignored in our description of electronic devices. The complexity of fully quantum calculations grows exponentially with the number of particles involved, limiting supercomputer-based calculations to only a handful of atoms.
The Optical Lattice Emulator (OLE) program seeks to devise a means to understand and explore the fully quantum mechanical treatment of materials. In essence, the OLE program will construct an emulator—an artificial material whose behavior is governed by the same underlying mathematical description as the material of interest. This emulator will be built using ultra-cold bosonic and fermionic atoms held in an appropriate geometry by an optical lattice formed by laser beams. Controlling the states of the atoms and the optical lattice will enable the careful measurement of the properties of the artificial material, and therefore an understanding of the properties of a material system of interest. Repetitive control and measurement will enable the construction of phase diagrams that relay the behavior of the bulk material under specific conditions. Such a tool should enable profound changes in our fundamental understanding of advanced materials such as high-temperature superconductors. In addition, the tool developed under this program will permit the design and investigation of novel material systems.
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