Techniques to measure quantum criticality in cold atoms

Understand

Attempts to understand zero temperature phase transitions have forced physicists to consider a regime where the standard paradigms of condensed matter physics break down [1-4].

• These quantum critical systems lack a simple description in terms of weakly interacting quasiparticles, but over the past 20 years physicists have gained deep insights into their properties.
• Most dramatically, theory predicts that universal scaling relationships describe their finite temperature thermodynamics up to remarkably high temperatures.
• Unfortunately, these universal functions are hard to calculate: for example there are no reliable general techniques [4,5] to calculate the scaling functions for dynamics.