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Previous work showed that the commonly used fluorescent protein EYFP can be bleached and reactivated. Exploiting this property allows super-resolution in vivo imaging of EYFP-labeled structures in living bacteria. Fölling et al., also in this issue, describe a related approach for super-resolution imaging using other ordinary fluorophores.

There are two different approaches for creating complex atomic many-body quantum systems — the macroscopic and the microscopic — which have, until now, been fairly disconnected. A quantum gas 'microscope' is now demonstrated that bridges the two approaches and can be used to detect single atoms held in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice. This quantum gas microscope may enable addressing and read-out of large-scale quantum information systems based on ultracold atoms.

Direct, time-resolved observations of the correlated tunnelling of two interacting ultracold atoms through a barrier in a double-well potential are reported. Second-order tunnelling events, which are found to be the dominating dynamical effect in the strongly interacting regime, have not been previously directly observed with ultracold atoms.

Using the two stable electronic states of alkaline-earth atoms, an orbital spin-exchange interaction—the building block of orbital quantum magnetism—has been observed in a fermionic quantum gas.

Feynman’s diagrammatic technique is widely used in the description of quantum many-body systems. This work demonstrates an efficient method for summing Feynman diagrams with exponential computational cost in the diagram order, translating into polynomial scaling of the calculation time with the required accuracy.

Building on ideas from quantum information science and on recent experimental advances, the use of ultracold alkaline-earth atoms in optical lattices as quantum simulators of many-body phenomena is proposed. The corresponding models possess a high degree of symmetry and may provide fundamental insights into strongly correlated systems.

A major goal in the fields of ultracold quantum gases and quantum simulations is measuring the phase diagram of strongly interacting many-body systems. This has now been achieved in an optical-lattice-based quantum simulator. The simulation is validated through an ab initio comparison with large-scale numerical quantum Monte Carlo simulations.

A type of interaction blockade that occurs for ultracold atoms confined to an optical lattice may offer a means of reducing the temperature and, thus, entropy of quantum gases to the level necessary for quantum simulation.

An antiferromagnet with a correlation length that encompasses the whole system is created with the aid of quantum gas microscopy of cold atoms in an optical lattice.