Shedding Quantum Light on Strongly Correlated Materials

A. Title of the event

“Shedding Quantum Light on Strongly Correlated Materials”

B. Main focus of our workshop

This workshop aimed at identifying new research directions, as well as developing a comprehensive framework for constructing, probing, and modelling strong-coupling QED in correlated quantum materials, thereby establishing a common ground for physicists working in the fields of quantum optics and condensed matter.

C. Most important participants

The participants who should have mostly profited from this workshop are the students and young postdocs, through being exposed to the cutting edge research in this field from both the perspective of solid-state and atomic gases perspective. We hope this will help them building a specific profile at the border between communities.

D. How did scientific newcomers present themselves

Roughly one third of the talks were contributed by young applicants. We allotted the same amount of time for contributed talks as for invited talks. We were impressed by the clarity of presentation and quality of the results of all the contributed talks.

E. Scientific results of the workshop in the broader sense

It was important for us to have in-person workshops after the pandemic break, especially given the young and quickly developing field. For this reason, we decided to have the workshop fully on site, with plenty of time for discussions. One main result has thus been to provide an avenue for direct and extended scientific and personal interactions.

A second main result has been that these interactions took place across communities, between scientists that had never met before, and in several cases did not know about relevant research overlap.

We hope that this workshop will be a positve example and trigger future similar events merging the communities of quantum optics/atomic physics and solid-state physics under the common denominator of QED within materials.