Abstract:

Over the last decade, ultracold atoms in optical lattices have sparked a vast amount of interest in the fields of condensed matter, quantum optics and quantum information. Next to the recent achievements of e.g. single-site resolved detection of atoms in an optical lattice and the realization of Mott insulating states with fermions, the extension of the simple cubic lattice structure to optical superlattices with a unit cell containing more than one lattice site has substantially increased the complexity of condensed matter models accessible in experiments. In this talk, I will present the results of two experiments with ultracold bosonic atoms in our optical superlattice setup. I will start by giving a brief technical introduction to our strategy for realizing a fully controllable bichromatic superlattice. I will then show how we are able to use this superlattice to directly generate and detect local spin-spin correlations. Finally, I will present very recent results on modulation-driven correlated tunneling processes including the driven co-tunneling of particles and driven superexchange. The latter leads to a novel proposal for the realization of tunable effective-spin models in optical lattices.

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