Credit: Jason Smith
Graduate student Xibo Zhang (left) and Cheng Chin (right), associate professor in physics, examine experimental hardware in Chin’s ultracold laboratory at the University of Chicago. Zhang began working with Chin because of their mutual interest in quantum simulation, the idea that one type of quantum system, such as ultracold atoms in a laboratory setting, could be used to simulate another system, like the one that dominated the universe shortly after the big bang.