Speaker
Description
Ultracold atoms are a laboratory playground for studying emergent phenomena in many-body physics. The first conceptual step along the path from non-interacting (or mean-field) physics to many-body physics is via two-body interactions and correlations. Here, the diluteness of theses systems is appealing: the separation of scale between inter-atomic distances (typically over 100 nm) and the interaction range (typically less than 5 nm) provide both a strong connection to ab-initio theory and new avenues for control. I will discuss how two-body correlations can be observed, including a newly developed method that uses rapid dimer projection. The I will discuss several recent experiments that use correlations to study emergent interaction symmetry and relaxation dynamics of ultracold fermions. As an outlook, I will discuss some open problems in few-body systems.