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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Optical tweezer manipulation for atom tetris

Hyosub Kim, Woojun Lee, Jaewook Ahn

Published Apr 18, 2017• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Atoms can be individually captured and guided by light through optical dipole-trapping. However, applying this to many atoms simultaneously has been difficult due to the low inertia of atoms. Recently dynamically-controlled laser beams achieved such demonstrations, enabling a bottom-up approach to form arbitrary atom lattices, deterministic atom loading, atom-sorting, and even single-atom-level machinery. Here we report the latest improvements of the single-atom-level dynamic holographic optical tweezers. With the hardware and software upgrades to be explained in the text, the overall performance has improved to form arbitrary 2D lattices of a size about N=20, with success probability exceeding 50%.

DOI
10.1117/12.2268849

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Atoms can be individually captured and guided by light through optical dipole-trapping. However, applying this to many atoms simultaneously has been difficult due to the low inertia of atoms. Recently dynamically-controlled laser beams achieved such demonstrations, enabling a bottom-up approach to form arbitrary atom lattices, deterministic atom loading, atom-sorting, and even single-atom-level machinery. Here we report the latest improvements of the single-atom-level dynamic holographic optical tweezers. With the hardware and software upgrades to be explained in the text, the overall performance has improved to form arbitrary 2D lattices of a size about N=20, with success probability exceeding 50%.
Single atoms are promising candidates for physically implementing quantum bits, the fundamental unit of quantum information. We have built an apparatus for cooling, trapping and imaging single rubidium atoms in microscopic optical tweezers. The traps are formed from a tightly focused off-resonant laser beam, which traps atoms using the optical dipole force. The traps have a diameter of ~1 μm and a depth of ~1 mK. The novelty of our approach is the use a digital mirror device (DMD) to generate multiple independently movable tweezers from a single laser beam. The DMD consists of an array of micro-mirrors that can be switched on and off, thus acting as a binary amplitude modulator. We use the DMD to imprint a computer-generated hologram on the laser beam, which is converted in to the desired arrangement of traps in the focal plane of a lens. We have developed fast algorithms for calculating binary holograms suitable for the DMD. In addition, we use this method to measure and correct for errors in the phase of the wavefront caused by optical aberrations, which is necessary for producing diffraction-limited focal spots. Using this apparatus, we have trapped arrays of up to 20 atoms with arbitrary geometrical arrangements. We exploit light-assisted collisions between atoms to ensure there is at most one atom per trapping site. We measure the temperature of the atoms in the traps to be 12 μK, and their lifetime to be 1.4 s. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to select individual atoms from an array and transport them over a distance of 14μm with laser cooling, and 5 μm without.
Neutral atoms trapped by laser light are among the most promising candidates for storing and processing information in a quantum computer or simulator. The application certainly calls for a scalable and flexible scheme for addressing and manipulating the atoms. We have now made this a reality by implementing a fast and versatile method to dynamically control the position of neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers. The tweezers result from a spatial light modulator (SLM) controlling and shaping a large number of optical dipole-force traps. Trapped atoms adapt to any change in the potential landscape, such that one can rearrange and randomly access individual sites within atom-trap arrays.
We report on the experimental realization of a standing-wave atom tweezer (SWAT) by aligning tightly focused dipole laser beams from a commercial objective lens and a metalens on a chip. By independently tuning the laser intensities of the two beams, we demonstrate the controlled loading of multiple atoms into the SWAT. We systematically investigate the influence of the standing-wave potential modulation depth on single-atom loading dynamics and quantitatively estimate the number of atoms in the SWAT by calculating the fluorescence of trapped atoms. Our results show that the SWAT can trap a chain of more than 20 atoms with significantly suppressed atom collisions, exhibiting a lifetime exceeding 1 second. Our work presents a versatile platform for investigating atom dynamics in 1D optical lattices, enabling the study of collective atom-photon interactions and many-body physics in a highly controllable system.
Tightly focused laser beams form optical tweezers that can hold and manipulate individual atoms. They give superb control over microscopic quantum systems and have paved the way for bottom up assembly of few-atom systems. Such assembled systems provide an ideal starting point for many fundamental studies of atomic interactions and few-atom phenomena. Here we review the present stage of these fields, as well as some of the basic experimental techniques required for these experiments Figure from [74].
Microscopically controlled neutral atoms in optical tweezers and lattices have led to exciting advances in the study of quantum information and quantum many-body systems. The light shifts of atomic levels from the trapping potential in these systems can result in detrimental effects such as fluctuating dipole force heating, inhomogeneous detunings, and inhibition of laser cooling, which limits the atomic species that can be manipulated. In particular, these light shifts can be large enough to prevent loading into optical tweezers directly from a magneto-optical trap. We implement a general solution to these limitations by loading, as well as cooling and imaging the atoms with temporally alternating beams, and present an analysis of the role of heating and required cooling for single atom tweezer loading. Because this technique does not depend on any specific spectral properties, it should enable the optical tweezer platform to be extended to nearly any atomic or molecular species that can be laser cooled and optically trapped.