arXiv:0908.0454 · Physical Review Letters
Entanglement of Two Individual Neutral Atoms Using Rydberg Blockade
Tatjana Wilk, Alpha Gaétan, Charles Evellin, Janik Wolters, Y. Miroshnychenko, Philippe Grangier, Antoine Browaeys
Abstract
We report the generation of entanglement between two individual 87Rb atoms in hyperfine ground states |F=1,M=1> and |F=2,M=2> which are held in two optical tweezers separated by 4 microm. Our scheme relies on the Rydberg blockade effect which prevents the simultaneous excitation of the two atoms to a Rydberg state. The entangled state is generated in about 200 ns using pulsed two-photon excitation. We quantify the entanglement by applying global Raman rotations on both atoms. We measure that 61% of the initial pairs of atoms are still present at the end of the entangling sequence. These pairs are in the target entangled state with a fidelity of 0.75.