With the advent of laser cooling and trapping, neutral atoms have become a foundational source of accuracy for applications in metrology and are showing great potential for their use as qubits in quantum information. In metrology, neutral atoms provide the most accurate references for the measurement of time and acceleration. The unsurpassed stability provided by these systems make neutral atoms an attractive avenue to explore applications in quantum information and computing. However, to fully investigate the field of quantum information, we require a method to generate entangling interactions between neutral-atom qubits. Recent progress in the use of highly-excited Rydberg states for strong dipolar interactions has shown great promise for controlled entanglement using the Rydberg blockade phenomenon. I report the use of singly-trapped cesium atoms as qubits for applications in metrology and quantum information. Each atom provides a physical basis for a single qubit by encoding the required information into the ground-state hyperfine structure of cesium. Through the manipulation of these qubits with microwave and optical frequency sources, we demonstrate the capacity for arbitrary single-qubit control by driving qubit rotations in three orthogonal directions on the Bloch sphere. With this control, we develop an atom interferometer that far surpasses the force sensitivity of other approaches by applying the well-established technique of light-pulsed atom-matterwave interferometry to single atoms. Following this, we focus on two-qubit interactions using highly-excited Rydberg states. Through the development of a unique single-photon approach to Rydberg excitation using an ultraviolet laser at 319 nm, we observe the Rydberg blockade interaction between atoms separated by 6.6(3) microns. Motivated by the observation of Rydberg blockade, we study the application of Rydberg-dressed states for a quantum controlled-phase gate. Using a realistic simulation of the dressed-state dynamics, we calculate a controlled-phase gate fidelity of 94% that is primarily limited by Doppler frequency shifts. Finally, we employ our single-photon excitation laser to measure the Rydberg-dressed interaction, thus demonstrating the viability of this approach.
With the advent of laser cooling and trapping, neutral atoms have become a foundational source of accuracy for applications in metrology and are showing great potential for their use as qubits in quantum information. In metrology, neutral atoms provide the most accurate references for the measurement of time and acceleration. The unsurpassed stability provided by these systems make neutral atoms an attractive avenue to explore applications in quantum information and computing. However, to fully investigate the field of quantum information, we require a method to generate entangling interactions between neutral-atom qubits. Recent progress in the use of highly-excited Rydberg states for strong dipolar interactions has shown great promise for controlled entanglement using the Rydberg blockade phenomenon. I report the use of singly-trapped cesium atoms as qubits for applications in metrology and quantum information. Each atom provides a physical basis for a single qubit by encoding the required information into the ground-state hyperfine structure of cesium. Through the manipulation of these qubits with microwave and optical frequency sources, we demonstrate the capacity for arbitrary single-qubit control by driving qubit rotations in three orthogonal directions on the Bloch sphere. With this control, we develop an atom interferometer that far surpasses the force sensitivity of other approaches by applying the well-established technique of light-pulsed atom-matterwave interferometry to single atoms. Following this, we focus on two-qubit interactions using highly-excited Rydberg states. Through the development of a unique single-photon approach to Rydberg excitation using an ultraviolet laser at 319 nm, we observe the Rydberg blockade interaction between atoms separated by 6.6(3) microns. Motivated by the observation of Rydberg blockade, we study the application of Rydberg-dressed states for a quantum controlled-phase gate. Using a realistic simulation of the dressed-state dynamics, we calculate a controlled-phase gate fidelity of 94% that is primarily limited by Doppler frequency shifts. Finally, we employ our single-photon excitation laser to measure the Rydberg-dressed interaction, thus demonstrating the viability of this approach.
In any physical platform, two ingredients are essential for quantum information processing: single-qubit control, and entangling interactions between qubits. Neutral atoms can be individually controlled with high fidelity and are resilient to environmental noise, making them attractive candidates for implementing quantum information protocols. However, achieving strong interactions remains a major obstacle. One way to increase the interaction strength between neutral atoms is to excite them into high-lying Rydberg states, which exhibit large electric dipole moments (and by extension, strong electric dipole-dipole interactions). By slowly ramping up the Rydberg level coupling in a system, one can "dress'' the atomic ground states with some Rydberg character; this maps the Rydberg dipole interaction to an effective interaction between ground states. Such Rydberg-dressed interaction is the focus of this dissertation. After describing the physics of the Rydberg-dressed interaction, we propose three protocols that demonstrate its versatility and provide a framework for considering some of the details of realistic implementation. In all three cases, Rydberg dressing --- along with some form of single-atom control --- is used to generate highly entangled states of interest. Our first proposal relates to the adiabatic model of quantum computing, in which solutions to problems are encoded in the ground states of carefully engineered Hamiltonians. The Rydberg-dressed interaction can provide nonlinear Hamiltonian terms, allowing us to encode NP-hard and other interesting problems. We model this protocol in the presence of decoherence, and find that computational fidelities of ~0.98 for four atoms should be possible with currently realistic experimental parameters. Our second proposal is also related to quantum computing, this time in the circuit model. The Rydberg-dressed interaction can be used to generate a controlled-NOT logic gate which, when interwoven with single-qubit gates, can perform universal quantum computation. Experimentally, noise due to atomic thermal motion has been a primary limitation on the fidelities of these gates. We show that a Doppler-free setup, with counterpropagating lasers, effectively suppresses this type of noise, allowing simulated fidelities of up to ~0.998 per gate. Such strong suppression is only possible because the Doppler-free configuration can harness the natural robustness of adiabatic dressing; other gate schemes using, e.g., resonant pulses, do not exhibit the same degree of improvement. Finally, we consider exploiting the many-body character of the Rydberg-dressed interaction to generate collective entanglement in mesoscopic ensembles of neutral atoms. An atomic ensemble uniformly illuminated by a single Rydberg-exciting laser is isomorphic to the well-known Jaynes-Cummings model. In addition to adapting generic Jaynes-Cummings entanglement protocols developed in other platforms, one can apply microwaves to drive entanglement in a way that is unique to the atomic platform. We prove that by allowing the microwave phase to vary in time, one can generate arbitrary symmetric states of the ensemble. While this method compares favorably with other entanglement protocols in many ways, the required frequency of phase switching presents a fundamental limitation on its effectiveness. To mitigate this, we propose a variant scheme in which parameters are chosen to only allow excitations within the system's dressed-ground subspace; this effectively cuts phase switching demands in half. All three protocols serve to illustrate the power of the Rydberg-dressed interaction and suggest directions for future study.
We demonstrate a Rydberg-dressed ground-state blockade that provides a strong tunable interaction energy (~1 MHz in units of Planck's constant) between spins of individually trapped cesium atoms.With this interaction we directly produce Bell-state entanglement between two atoms with a fidelity ≥ 81(2)%, excluding atom loss events, and ≥ 60(3)% when loss is included [arXiv].Our method is based on a new technique that produces a blockade of Rydberg-dressed ground states.This approach allows single-step, direct entanglement of long-lived ground (clock) states in our cesium atoms.The on-demand interaction we employ-Rydberg-dressed ground states-is a long sought after fundamental capability for numerous proposals spanning from new phases of matter in ultracold quantum gases to spin-squeezed metrology in clocks and quantum computation protocols.We not only clearly measure this elusive Rydberg-dressed interaction, but also employ it to demonstrate high fidelity Bell-state generation.The entanglement generation differs from previous work in a fundamental way; the probability remains entirely in the Rydberg-dressed ground state, freeing the approach from the experimental burden of coherently exciting optical transitions to and from the Rydberg states.In principle Rydberg-dressed atoms are more insensitive to various decoherence mechanisms and lead to a better quantum control fidelity [Keating PRA].In addition, the interaction we demonstrate is nearly 4 orders of magnitude larger than that produced in the typical experiment based on ultra cold collisions.
The advent of digital neutral-atom quantum computers relies on the development of fast and robust protocols for high-fidelity quantum operations. In this work, we introduce a novel scheme for entangling gates using four atomic levels per atom: a ground-state qubit and two Rydberg states. A laser field couples the qubit to one of the two Rydberg states, while a microwave field drives transitions between the two Rydberg states, enabling a resonant dipole-dipole interaction between different atoms. We show that controlled- Z gates can be realized in this scheme without requiring optical phase modulation and relying solely on a microwave field with time-dependent phase and amplitude. We demonstrate that such gates are faster and less sensitive to Rydberg decay than state-of-the-art Rydberg gates based on van der Waals interactions. Moreover, we systematically stabilize our protocol against interatomic distance fluctuations and analyze its performance in realistic setups with rubidium or cesium atoms. Our results open up new avenues to the use of microwave-driven dipolar interactions for quantum computation with neutral atoms.
The neutral atom platform has become an attractive choice to study the science of quantum information and quantum simulation, where intense efforts have been devoted to the entangling processes between individual atoms. A two-qubit controlled-phase gate via Rydberg blockade is one of the most essential elements. Recent theoretical studies have suggested the advantages of introducing nontrivial waveform modulation into the gate protocol, which is anticipated to improve its performance towards the next stage. We report our recent experimental results in realizing the two-qubit controlled-phase (CZ) gate via single-modulated-pulse off-resonant modulated driving embedded in a two-photon transition for Rb atoms. It relies on a global driving laser pulse with a carefully calculated smooth waveform to gain the appropriate phase accumulations required by CZ gate. Combining this CZ gate with global microwave pulses, two-atom entanglement is generated with the raw fidelity of 0.945(6). After accounting for state preparation and measurement errors, we extract the entanglement operation fidelity to be 0.980(7). Our work features completing the CZ gate operation within a single pulse to avoid shelved population in the Rydberg levels, thus demonstrating another promising route for realizing a high-fidelity two-qubit gate for the neutral atom platform.
The Rydberg dipole blockade has emerged as the standard mechanism to induce entanglement between neutral-atom qubits. In these protocols, laser fields that couple qubit states to Rydberg states are modulated to implement entangling gates. Here we present an alternative protocol to implement entangling gates via Rydberg dressing and a microwave-field-driven spin-flip blockade [Y.-Y. Jau et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 71 (2016)]. We consider the specific example of qubits encoded in the clock states of cesium. An auxiliary hyperfine state is optically dressed so that it acquires partial Rydberg character. It thus acts as a proxy Rydberg state, with a nonlinear light shift that plays the role of blockade strength. A microwave-frequency field coupling a qubit state to this dressed auxiliary state can be modulated to implement entangling gates. Logic gate protocols designed for the optical regime can be imported to this microwave regime, for which experimental control methods are more robust. We show that unlike the strong dipole-blockade regime usually employed in Rydberg experiments, going to a moderate-spin-flip-blockade regime results in faster gates and smaller Rydberg decay. We study various regimes of operations that can yield high-fidelity two-qubit entangling gates and characterize their analytical behavior. In addition to the inherent robustness of microwave control, we can design these gates to be more robust to laser amplitude and frequency noises at the cost of a small increase in Rydberg decay.
We have numerically simulated a two-qubit CZ gate for ultracold neutral atoms based on Rydberg blockade, utilizing three-photon excitation to Rydberg states. The three-photon laser excitation overcomes lack of individual addressability for entangling gates in atomic arrays, which is a key limitation of conventional schemes of quantum information processing with neutral atoms. This is achieved by mitigating sensitivity to laser intensity fluctuations caused by spatial motion of atoms in optical tweezers. Our goal is to investigate the gate performance when three-photon laser excitation is used. We considered Levine-Pichler gate which applies an abrupt phase jump at the center of the control laser pulse. Our simulation accounts for the influence of spontaneous decay of intermediate and Rydberg states and finite Rydberg excitation energies. We obtained the maximum fidelity of the CZ gate around 99.7% for the model based on probability amplitudes and 99.72% for the model based on density matrices. This value exceeds the threshold required for the application of quantum error correction protocols, demonstrating the promise of this gate for experimental realization. This work was supported by BASIS foundation Grant No. № 25-1-1-57-5