Prof Ulrich Schneider

Biography

Before coming to Cambridge in 2015, Prof Schneider worked as a Senior Scientist/Group Leader in the Quantum Optics group at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich. Before that, he did a PhD at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz supervised by Prof. Immanuel Bloch and read physics at the Universität Kaiserslautern.

His main research interest is in quantum many-body dynamics. Following a statement by P. W. Anderson, ‘More is Different’, genuine many-body phenomena are emergent phenomena that only appear when many particles come together, typical examples being superfluidity or magnetism.

Prof Schneider is the recipient of the IOP 2023 Joseph Thomson Medal, the 2016 Rudolf-Kaiser Preis, and the 2015 Aspen Winter Prize. Funding for his research includes an ERC Starting Grant (2016), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021) and several UKRI grants including Programme Grants and the UK Quantum technology Hubs.

Research

Our group is mainly working on many-body phenomena at the interface between quantum optics and solid state physics.

We study this physics using ultracold atoms, that is Bose-Einstein condensates and degenerate Fermi gases, which we load into optical lattices. These periodic optical potentials play the role of the electrostatic potential felt by electrons in a conventional solid. Thereby, we effectively build a Quantum Simulator for condensed matter physics, where we can study many-body physics in a very clean and precisely controlled system and have all the tools from quantum optics at our disposal.

In addition to the above work on Quantum Simulators, we are also working on Quantum Sensors in the form of large-scale atom interferometry.

For details see:
www.manybody.phy.cam.ac.uk