# Abstract:

One growth field in cold-atom physics is the trapping of atoms in laser standing waves (so-called "optical lattices").  This has raised the exciting prospect of using these systems to simulate condensed matter's hard-to-solve models, with the optical lattice playing the role of the ionic potential and the atoms acting as the electrons.  Indeed, Immanuel Bloch has gone so far as to call these systems "artificial crystals of light".This scheme has many attractions, notably the tunability of the model parameters and the complete absence of disorder (unless it's put in deliberately).  But there are also complications: not only is the simulation system much smaller than a real condensed matter one, but the atoms are confined differently from the electrons in a solid.I shall show that this difference in confinement can cause qualitative differences between the cold-atom and solid-state cases, and discuss how to overcome this problem to obtain quantitative results from such simulation schemes.

Toronto Quantum Matter Seminars
Event series  Condensed Matter EventsQO/AMO SeminarsToronto Quantum Matter Seminars