Experimental Quantum Optics
and Photonics Group

Quantum gases

Caesium in lattice potentials

Quantum gas microscopes

Vortices in Superfluids

Latest News

APS ViewPoint ‘‘An Accordion Lattice Playing a Soliton Tune’’

Your article on lattice solitons has been featured with a Viewpoint article by the American Physical Society.

Tunable optical lattices for the creation of matter-wave lattice solitons

We present an experimental setup which provides a versatile environment to study soliton formation and evolution in lattice potentials. Opt. Express 34, 623-637 (2026).

Lattice solitons of matter waves.

We demonstrated the existence of single- and multi-site solitons in an optical accordion lattice, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 263404 (2025).

New team member

Ethan Kerr joined the team as a PhD student. Welcome Ethan!

Phonon excitations of Floquet-driven superfluids in a tilted optical lattice

Interactions in Floquet-driven quantum gases cause unwanted heating and excitation modes. We found a general set of resonance conditions that explain this ‘‘Floquet heating’’ for superfluids in optical lattices. Phys. Rev. Research 6, 023323 (2024).

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Recent publications

Deterministic nucleation and dynamics of infilled multiply-charged vortices in an immiscible 87Rb-41K mixture

(2026)

We propose a method for controllably generating multiply-charged vortices in immiscible Bose-Einstein condensates. We achieve this by …

R. Doran, K. Wilson

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Quantum-gas microscopy and Talbot interferometry of the Bose-glass phase

Physical Review A 113, (2026)

Disordered potentials fundamentally affect transport and coherence in quantum systems, giving rise to a Bose-glass phase in interacting …

L. Koehn, C. Parsonage, C. W. Duncan, P. Kirton, A. J. Daley, T. Hilker, E. Haller, A. La Rooij, S. Kuhr

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Tunable optical lattices for the creation of matter-wave lattice solitons

Optics Express 34, 623–637 (2026)

We present experimental techniques that employ an optical accordion lattice with dynamically tunable spacing to create and study bright …

R. Cruickshank, A. La Rooij, E. F. Kerr, T. Hilker, S. Kuhr, E. Haller

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Experimental observation of single- and multi-site matter-wave solitons in an optical accordion lattice

Physical Review Letters 135, (2025)

We report the experimental observation of discrete bright matter-wave solitons with attractive interaction in an optical lattice. Using …

R. Cruickshank, F. Lorenzi, A. La Rooij, E. F. Kerr, T. Hilker, S. Kuhr, L. Salasnich, E. Haller

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Rapid stochastic spatial light modulator calibration and pixel crosstalk optimization

Optics Express 32, 48957–48971 (2024)

Holographic light potentials generated by phase-modulating liquid-crystal spatial light modulators (SLMs) are widely used in quantum …

P. Schroff, E. Haller, S. Kuhr, A. La Rooij

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