We experimentally demonstrate trapping of ~1,000 individual strontium atoms and an optical tweezer array with 360,000 trapping sites using TiO 2 holographic metasurfaces with a diameter of only a few millimeters and high power-handling capabilities.

Jan 1, 20260 citations

arXiv:2411.05321 · Nature

Trapping of single atoms in metasurface optical tweezer arrays

Aaron Holman, Yuan Xu, Ximo Sun, Jiahao Wu, Mingxuan Wang, Zezheng Zhu, Bojeong Seo, Nanfang Yu, Sebastian Will

Published Jan 14, 2026• 32 citations

arXiv HTML PDF

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09961-5

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\sim 10,000

tweezers. Moreover, these methods require additional microscope objectives to focus the light into micrometer-sized spots, which further complicates system integration and scalability. Here, we demonstrate the experimental generation of an optical tweezer array containing

280\times 280

spots using a metasurface, nearly an order of magnitude more than most existing systems. The metasurface leverages a large number of subwavelength phase-control pixels to engineer the wavefront of the incident light, enabling both large-scale tweezer generation and direct focusing into micron-scale spots without the need for a microscope. This result shifts the scalability bottleneck for atom arrays from the tweezer generation hardware to the available laser power. Furthermore, the array shows excellent intensity uniformity exceeding

90\%

, making it suitable for homogeneous single-atom loading and paving the way for trapping arrays of more than

10,000

atoms in the near future.