Quantum control of spin correlations in ultracold lattice gases

We describe a technique for the preparation of quantum spin correlations in a lattice gas of ultracold atoms using an atom-light interaction of the kind routinely employed in quantum spin polarization spectroscopy. Our method is based on entropic cooling via quantum nondemolition measurement and feedback, and allows the creation and detection of quantum spin correlations, as well as a certain degree of multipartite entanglement which we verify using a generalization of the entanglement witness described previously M. Cramer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 020401 (2011). We illustrate the procedure with examples drawn from the bilinear-biquadratic Hamiltonian, which can be modeled by a one-dimensional chain of spin-1 atoms.