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arXiv:1811.01448 · Physical Review X

Gray-Molasses Optical-Tweezer Loading: Controlling Collisions for Scaling Atom-Array Assembly

Mark O. Brown, Tobias Thiele, Christopher Kiehl, Ting‐Wei Hsu, Cindy A. Regal

Published Mar 29, 2019• 97 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A new technique for loading atoms into an optical trap does so with 90% efficiency in traps much shallower than in standard techniques, enabling efficient preparation of large, ordered single-atom arrays that are key for large-scale quantum simulation and computation.
DOI
10.1103/physrevx.9.011057

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In this talk, I will discuss our pathway toward quantum simulations and computation with neutral atoms in arrays of optical tweezers cooled to their motional ground state. Initially, I will talk about two-atom interference experiments, e.g. the atomic analog to the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect, and how we create spin entangled states. I will then talk about how we scale our system to accommodate 80 single atoms, loaded into 100 traps while maintaining full single-atom control. For this efficient loading process, we control atomic collisions in the tweezers using grey molasses. When combined with ground-state cooling and atom-rearranging, this should allow us to form a micro-BEC with controlled atom number and entropy.
We demonstrate rapid loading of a small array of optical tweezers with a single ^{87}Rb atom per site. We find that loading efficiencies of up to 90% per tweezer are achievable in less than 170 ms for traps separated by more than 1.7 μm. Interestingly, we find the load efficiency is affected by nearby traps and present the efficiency as a function of the spacing between two optical tweezers. This enhanced loading, combined with subsequent rearranging of filled sites, will enable the study of quantum many-body systems via quantum gas assembly.
Assembling and maintaining large arrays of individually addressable atoms is a key requirement for continued scaling of neutral-atom-based quantum computers and simulators. In this work, we demonstrate a new paradigm for assembly of atomic arrays, based on a synergistic combination of optical tweezers and cavity-enhanced optical lattices, and the incremental filling of a target array from a repetitively filled reservoir. In this protocol, the tweezers provide microscopic rearrangement of atoms, while the cavity-enhanced lattices enable the creation of large numbers of optical traps with sufficient depth for rapid low-loss imaging of atoms. We apply this protocol to demonstrate near-deterministic filling (99% per-site occupancy) of 1225-site arrays of optical traps. Because the reservoir is repeatedly filled with fresh atoms, the array can be maintained in a filled state indefinitely. We anticipate that this protocol will be compatible with mid-circuit reloading of atoms into a quantum processor, which will be a key capability for running large-scale error-corrected quantum computations whose durations exceed the lifetime of a single atom in the system. Published by the American Physical Society 2024