Abstract

With the tremendous advances in cooling and manipulation techniques, ultracold atomic gases have consolidated themselves as an ideal system to address fundamental questions in quantum few- and many-body physics. Recently, we have reached Bose-Einstein condensation and Fermi degeneracy with ultracold Erbium atoms. This “exotic” atomic species combines unusually rich atomic spectra and a large magnetic moment. In the quantum regime, bosonic Er atoms feature interactions of genuinely different nature. The more ordinary and magnetically-tunable contact interaction combines with the long-range and anisotropic magnetic dipolar interaction. The mere existence and competition between these two sources of interactions dictate the physics at play, disclosing a variety of intriguing quantum phases. This talk will provide an overview of some fascinating dipolar phenomena from the Innsbruck prospective.