Titus Franz defended successfully his PhD thesis on Rydberg atoms. Congratulations for this big result and good luck for your PostDoc in Munich!

Annika Tebben has been awarded with the “Ruprecht-Karls-Preis” for Physics for her PhD dissertation on “Rydberg Electromagnetically Induced Transparency – A vanishing linear response, resonances, and a stationary Rydberg polariton “. The ceremony took place on the evening of November 4th in the “Alten Aula” of the University of Heidelberg. We are proud of her and we wish her the best of luck for her future.

This month, our paper on “Floquet Hamiltonian engineering of an isolated many-body spin system” got published in Science! In this work, by periodically driving an isolated spin system, we changed a naturally given many-body Hamiltonian into a desired target form. Using a sequence of time-periodic microwave pulses, we change the Hamiltonian of our interacting Rydberg-spin system from a Heisenberg XX-model into an effective XYZ-model with tunable symmetry. As a consequence, the magnetization relaxation dynamic of the is drastically modified. The ability to engineering a wide range of Hamiltonians opens vast opportunities for implementing quantum simulation of non-equilibrium dynamics in a …