Physics Colloquium

The collective behavior of a many-body system near a continuous phase transition is insensitive to the details of its microscopic physics. Characteristic features near the phase transition, called critical phenomena, are that the thermodynamic observables follow generalized scaling laws. In this talk, I will discuss the observation of scale invariance and universality in ultracold atomic gases based on direct in situ imaging. Our observation points toward a growing density-density correlations in the critical regime and raises new perspectives to explore universal quantum critical dynamics.