Spin transport and many-particle entanglement in cold atomic ensembles

Strongly-correlated cold atoms provide a powerful tool for studying quantum many-body physics and the nature of entanglement. I will describe two promising platforms for these goals. The first part of this talk will present an experiment on spin transport in an optical lattice. Using a microscope with single-atom resolution, we watch atoms of different spins move through the lattice under an external potential gradient and extract the transport coefficients of the Fermi-Hubbard model. The second part of the talk will describe the generation of a many-particle entangled state, based on strong atom-light interactions in an optical cavity. We measure a negative-valued Wigner probability function, demonstrating the non-classical feature of a large atomic system.