Arno has been awarded the prestigious Lise-Meitner postdoctoral fellowship position from the FWF. This fellowship enables him to work on a new research project within the dipolar quantum gases group led by Francesca Ferlaino.
The project aims to study highly excited electronic states in erbium atoms confined in optical tweezers. These so-called Rydberg atoms have several exaggerated properties like their extreme polarizability and thus strong interaction, which makes Rydberg atoms promising candidates for quantum simulation. The research will exploit the rich electronic structure of erbium atoms to provide a novel experimental platform for quantum simulation, and will take place in our new lab space on the T-REQS setup.