UVa Physics professor Peter Schauss and colleagues demonstrate a quantum gas microscope to image individual fermionic atoms in a triangular lattice. They prepare a degenerate Fermi gas, load it into the triangular lattice, and image the individual atoms with high imaging fidelity using Raman sideband cooling. The triangular-lattice platform will allow the study of density and spin correlations in frustrated Hubbard models to observe the strange properties of frustrated systems, including quantum spin liquids without long-range ordering at zero temperature, time-reversal symmetry breaking, and spin-hole bound states with significance to the understanding of superfluidity.

"Site-Resolved Imaging of Ultracold Fermions in a Triangular-Lattice Quantum Gas Microscope", Jin Yang, Liyu Liu, Jirayu Mongkolkiattichai, and Peter Schauss, PRX Quantum 2, 020344 – Published 21 June 2021

See paper at https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2.020344

An image from the paper received a $1000 Insight Award: https://andor.oxinst.com/insight-awards