Over recent years, interest in quantum information processing has increased tremendously. This rise was fueled by activities of massive commercial players like IBM, Google, Microsoft and large investments in startups like D-Wave, Rigetti, Xanadu, Zapata and Cambridge Quantum Computing. The work of these companies typically focuses on universal quantum computers, which hold the premise of exponential speed-up for a variety of NP-hard problems. However, this universality usually comes at the price of algorithmic overhead for a wide range of tasks which generally leads to worse overall fidelity. If we give up the constraint of a universal quantum computer, we can build specialized quantum hardware for the problems of interest. Such systems are called quantum simulators
Ultra-cold atoms have become a leading platform of such quantum simulators at a large scale. Most importantly for us, they are the experimental platform our research group is working on. Already demonstrated applications involve an enormous variety of condensed-matter problems like e.g. the Hubbard model \cite{Bloch_2008}, topological systems \cite{Goldman_2014} , superfluidity \cite{Regal_2007} and disorder \cite{Lagendijk_2009} . More recently, cold atoms started to find applications to Ising models \cite{Bernien2017} and high-energy physics \cite{Zohar2016}.