Cavity quantum electrodynamics studies the strong interaction between matter and the electromagnetic field of an optical cavity: the enhanced interaction is useful both for reading the properties of the atoms with a fast, sensitive and weakly destructive measurement and for quantum simulation where atoms interact by exchangingphotons with each other at a distance. One of the drawbacks of these systems is the loss of spatial information that cavity-based measurement implies: the result of these measurements is an average of the properties of the atoms over the entire cavity field volume.

I will explain how we built and operated a cavity-microscope device that overcomes this problem: it realizes both a cavity and a pair of high numerical-aperture lenses in a single device and can be used to couple a microscopic part of the atomic cloud to the cavity field [1]. We produce a cavity-based image of the atomic density by scanning the position of the microscope focus.

This technology opens the doors to analog quantum simulations of programmable, all-to-all interacting systems. I will report about optical techniques to randomize cavity-mediated interactions [2]. These interactions can drastically change the behavior of the system, and open the door to the exploration of models of holographic quantum matter such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model [3] [4].

References
[1] Orsi, F., Sauerwein, N., Bhatt, R.P et al., Cavity microscope for micrometer-scale control of atomphoton
interactions , PRX Quantum 5 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.5.040333
[2] Sauerwein, N., Orsi, F., Uhrich, P. et al. Engineering random spin models with atoms in a high-finesse
cavity. Nat. Phys. 19, 1128–1134 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02033-3
[3] Uhrich, P., Bandyopadhyay, S., Sauerwein, N., et al, A cavity quantum electrodynamics implementation
of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model, arXiv:2303.11343 (2023)
[4] Baumgartner, R., Pelliconi, P., Bandyopadhyay, S. et al, Quantum simulation of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev
model using time-dependent disorder in optical cavities, arXiv:2411.17802 (2024)