Damien Bloch on Coupling Atom Arrays to Optical Cavities
May 11, 2026
The Nunnenkamp group at the University of Vienna hosted a Qnnect seminar with Damien Bloch from the Léonard group (ISTA).
In his talk, „Collective coupling of an atomic tweezer array to a high cooperativity cavity“, Damien presented an experiment that tackles one of the central challenges in quantum science: creating large entangled states. Most platforms are limited to interactions between neighboring particles — here, the team takes a different route by trapping single rubidium atoms in optical tweezers inside a high-finesse fiber cavity. The cavity light mediates long-range interactions between the atoms, with each atom strongly coupled to the light field. This opens the door to preparing and studying highly entangled many-body states.
After the talk, the discussions continued over a joint lunch — science exchange tastes best with food!
Thanks to Damien for the great talk and to everyone who joined the discussion!