Frontiers in Quantum Simulation: Transport, Gates, and Geometry

by Prof. Tilman Esslinger (ETH, Switzerland)

Wednesday 29 Apr 2026, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/London

117 (Physics West)

The idea of quantum simulation is to get insights into physical phenomena by synthetically creating insanely controlled quantum many-body systems. In my talk, I will show how quantum simulations of entire devices provide insights into the geometric dependency of superfluidity and will give a perspective on ab-initio engineering of quantum-correlations in optical lattices using high-fidelity gates.

In standard conductors, resistance decreases with increasing cross-section. However, in low-dimensional superconductors and superfluids residual resistance arises from topological fluctuations of the order parameter manifesting as phase slips in one-dimensional and vortices in two-dimensional systems. In a recent quantum simulation, we addressed the open question of how resistance and dissipation evolve as geometry interpolates between these two regimes, observing a quantum resistance paradox of low-dimensional superfluids.

Correlations are fundamental to understanding the functioning of quantum many-body systems, such as the Fermi-Hubbard model. Using the concept of topological pumping and exploiting a two-particle quantum holonomy, we realized a large number of ultra-high fidelity quantum swap gates that operate in parallel. These gates facilitate recent experiments focused on engineering complex many-body states in an optical lattice and extracting distant two-particle spin correlations.