| Abstract: | Over the past years, ultracold quantum gases in optical lattices have offered remarkable opportunities to investigate static and dynamic properties of strongly correlated bosonic or fermionic quantum many-body systems. In this talk, I will show how it has recently not only become possible to image such quantum gases with single atom sensitivity and single site resolution, but also how it is now possible to coherently control single atoms on individual lattice sites and to reveal the presence of individual quantum fluctuations of the many-body system. I will demonstrate how 'Higgs' type excitations occur at 24 orders of magnitude lower energy scales than in high energy experiments and how they can detected in our experimental setting. Finally, I will present a new method to realize artificial gauge fields for ultracold atoms and introduce a novel method to measure the Zak phase of topological band-structures using ultracold atoms. |
