The subproject “Super‑resolution quantum‑gas microscopy of ultracold dysprosium atoms” was carried out within the Magnetic Atom Quantum Simulator (MAQS) consortium and funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (grant 13N15231). It ran from 1 February 2020 to 31 January 2023 under the leadership of Tilman Pfau at the University of Stuttgart’s 5th Physics Institute. The consortium brought together several research groups that contributed expertise in laser cooling, optical lattice engineering, high‑resolution imaging, and many‑body theory, with the overall aim of building a quantum simulator based on dysprosium atoms that exhibit long‑range dipole‑dipole interactions.

The experimental effort was divided into three main tasks. First, a new apparatus was designed and built to trap and cool dysprosium in a short‑period optical lattice. The vacuum system, Zeeman slower, transverse cooling stage, magneto‑optical trap (MOT) optics, and optical dipole trap (ODT) geometry were all completed. A five‑beam MOT achieved up to one billion atoms at a temperature of about 20 µK, a significant increase over previous setups operating at similar temperatures. The high atom number directly improves the loading efficiency into the ODT, where evaporative cooling will bring the gas to quantum degeneracy. The ODT uses a crossed‑beam configuration whose arms can be steered with an acousto‑optic deflector, enabling a wide range of time‑averaged potential landscapes.

Second, the project focused on realizing super‑resolution quantum‑gas microscopy. All required laser systems were installed, and detailed simulations of the imaging chain—including light scattering, collection by the objective, and EMCCD response—were performed. The original design, which relied on a glass science cell with a solid‑immersion lens, was found to introduce unforeseen complications. Consequently, a new design was adopted: a steel vacuum chamber equipped with an in‑vacuum objective of numerical aperture 0.9, diffraction‑limited at the 421 nm imaging wavelength. This configuration allows the creation of all optical traps at the chamber centre while maintaining a very high NA, simplifying the trap geometry and raising trap frequencies. Simulations show that with this setup the system can reach the strongly correlated regime, where tunneling, on‑site interactions, nearest‑neighbour interactions, and temperature are all on the same order and exceed 200 Hz. The expected imaging performance supports reliable single‑atom and single‑site detection. Reconstruction fidelity exceeds 98 % for deterministic shelving of every second atom, and stochastic shelving further improves fidelity across a range of filling factors. Image analysis methods based on thresholding, maximum‑likelihood estimation, and an unsupervised autoencoder were implemented and benchmarked against simulated data.

Finally, the subproject aimed at quantum simulations of new many‑body states, correlations, and dynamics. While the implementation of the full simulation sequence will extend beyond the funding period, the groundwork laid—high‑quality Bose‑ and Fermi‑Hubbard lattices with tunable long‑range interactions, a robust imaging platform, and advanced analysis pipelines—provides a solid foundation for future experiments. The collaboration within MAQS has ensured that the technical achievements are complemented by theoretical support, enabling the exploration of extended Hubbard physics and non‑equilibrium dynamics in dipolar quantum gases.