Alkaline-earth atoms
The high degree of control over cold alkaline-earth atoms obtained in recent atomic clock experiments calls for their use for other applications. We propose to use their rich many-body physics for simulating condened matter Hamiltonians beyond the Hubbard model and for quantum information processing. We have shown that the decoupling of the nuclear spin from the electronic angular momentum leads to SU(N)-symmetric models (with N as large as 10), which have enjoyed tremendous theoretical interest but had no experimental realization so far. Moreover, the interplay of the nuclear spin with the electronic degrees of freedom provided by the two metastable states (1S0 and 3P0) which we denote as g and e, allows for the study of spin-orbital physics. This readily accessible experimental system may provide fundamental insights into systems such as transition metal oxides and heavy fermion materials exhibiting novel properties including colossal magnetoresistance and spin liquid phases.
