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.

arXiv:2307.16434Physical Review AJan 17, 202412 citations

Robust Mølmer-Sørensen gate for neutral atoms using rapid adiabatic Rydberg dressing

Anupam Mitra, Michael J. Martin, Grant W. Biedermann +3 more

The Rydberg blockade mechanism is now routinely considered for entangling qubits encoded in clock states of neutral atoms. Challenges towards implementing entangling gates with high fidelity include errors due to thermal motion of atoms, laser amplitude inhomogeneities, and imperfect Rydberg blockade. We show that adiabatic rapid passage by Rydberg dressing provides a mechanism for implementing two-qubit entangling gates by accumulating phases that are robust to these imperfections. We find that the typical error in implementing a two-qubit gate, such as the controlled phase gate, is dominated by errors in the single-atom light shift, and that this can be easily corrected using adiabatic dressing interleaved with a simple spin echo sequence. This results in a two-qubit M\o{}lmer-S\o{}rensen gate. A gate fidelity $\ensuremath{\sim}0.995$ is achievable with modest experimental parameters and a path to higher fidelities is possible for Rydberg states in atoms with a stronger blockade, longer lifetimes, and larger Rabi frequencies.

arXiv:1911.04045Physical Review AMar 20, 202071 citations