A New Route to High Temperature Superconductivity

"The search for high temperature superconductors has defined a large fraction of condensed matter research over past few decades. A simultaneous effort has been spent to understand the physics of strong electronic interactions which play a crucial role in these materials. Recently, ultracold atomic systems have come up as a designer platform to study the physics of strongly interacting quantum many body systems in controlled environments. In this colloquium, I will first review this connection before discussing our work on the Ionic Hubbard model, which shows that charge fluctuations induced by competition between potential energy and inter-particle interactions around a Mott insulator lead to a superconducting state with a high transition temperature."