QCD calculations with optical lattices?

Understand

By trapping cold polarizable atoms in periodic potentials created by crossed laser beams, it is now possible to experimentally create "clean" lattice systems.

• Experimentalists have successfully engineered local and nearest-neighbor interactions that approximately recreate Hubbard-like models on table tops.
• I discuss the possibility of using this new technology in the context of lattice gauge theory and in particular, relativistic dispersion relations, flavor symmetry, functional derivatives and emerging local gauge symmetry.