Imaging of microscopic particles allows fundamental insights into puzzling macroscopic physics. For quantum materials, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has played a pivotal role in unraveling the physics of high-temperature superconductors, while quantum gas microscopy with ultracold atoms allows sampling of highly entangled states of matter. In this talk, we present how, numerically, microscopy of quantum many-body systems is performed using minimally entangled typical thermal states, and demonstrate its relation to quantum gas microscopes.
Applied to the paradigmatic Hubbard model of high-temperature superconductors, the ground state stripe phase in the underdoped regime emerges from a heterogeneous charge background, with nanoscale charge clusters forming already within the pseudogap regime. In the superconducting case, the parent state features local pairing tightly bound to these charge clusters, with phase coherence across the full system emerging upon entering a supersolid ground state: a phase characterized by coexisting charge order and superconductivity. We relate these findings to STM and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments on cuprate superconductors, corroborating a physical picture of nanoscale phase separation.
References:
A. Sinha, H. Karlsson, M. Ulaga, A. Wietek, arXiv:2603.20368 [cond-mat.str-el]
T Chalopin et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123 (4), e2525539123 (2026)
A. Sinha, A. Wietek, Nat. Commun., 16, 10807 (2025)
A. Wietek, Y.-Y. He, S. R. White, A. Georges, E. M. Stoudenmire, Phys. Rev. X 11, 031007 (2021)
