Abstract

Ultracold atoms in optical lattices have opened new opportunities for exploring models from many-body physics in recent years. Not only do these systems offer possibilities to engineer a range of Hamiltonian models and study the corresponding quantum phases, but they also open the door to exploration of out-of-equilibrium many-body dynamics. At the same time, quantum simulation with these systems raises several important challenges. These include (i) how to engineer many-body states with sufficiently low temperatures and entropies to observe sensitive many-body phenomena, and (ii) how to make use of the unique properties of these atomic physics systems to go beyond many-body physics that is studied in other areas (e.g., solid state physics).

I will discuss some of our recent theoretical work that sets about addressing some of these challenges. In particular, I will present new adiabatic state preparation schemes for the production of magnetically ordered states of cold atoms, and analyse their robustness to technical noise and other heating sources, including spontaneous emissions. I will also describe new ideas to engineer dominant three-body interactions with cold atoms in optical lattices by using photon-assisted tunnelling processes.