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Viewpoint: Alkaline Atoms Held with Optical Tweezers

Antoine Browaeys

Published Dec 28, 2018• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Three separate groups demonstrate the trapping of two-electron atoms in arrays of optical tweezers, opening up new opportunities for quantum simulation and many-body studies.

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Alkaline Atoms Held with Optical Tweezers

Antoine Browaeys

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Alkaline Atoms Held with Optical TweezersThree separate groups demonstrate the trapping of two-electron atoms in arrays of optical tweezers, opening up new opportunities for quantum simulation and many-body studies.by Antoine Browaeys * Q uantum technology is a very active field of research, in which the resources of quantum physics, such as superposition and entanglement, are utilized to perform tasks that are classically hard or impossible.The promises from this field are many, ranging from quantum computation of difficult mathematical problems to the building of more sensitive sensors.But to realize these possibilities, experimentalists have to engineer well-controlled quantum systems made of many individual elements that can interact with each other.Among the many platforms currently studied (ions, photons, electron spins, to name a few), neutral atoms have the advantage that they can be manipulated with high accuracy, and they are scalable in the sense that many thousands of atoms can be controlled.New experiments by three separate groups have
Engineering controllable, strongly interacting many-body quantum systems is at the frontier of quantum simulation and quantum information processing. Arrays of laser-cooled neutral atoms in optical tweezers have emerged as a promising platform because of their flexibility and the potential for strong interactions via Rydberg states. Existing neutral atom array experiments utilize alkali atoms, but alkaline-earth atoms offer many advantages in terms of coherence and control, and also open the door to new applications in precision measurement and time keeping. In this Letter, we present a technique to trap individual alkaline-earth-like ytterbium (Yb) atoms in optical tweezer arrays. The narrow ^{1}S_{0}-^{3}P_{1} intercombination line is used for both cooling and imaging in a magic-wavelength optical tweezer at 532 nm. The low Doppler temperature allows for imaging near the saturation intensity, resulting in a very high atom detection fidelity. We demonstrate the imaging fidelity concretely by observing rare (<1 in 10^{4} images) spontaneous quantum jumps into and out of a metastable state. We also demonstrate stochastic loading of atoms into a two-dimensional, 144-site tweezer array. This platform will enable advances in quantum information processing, quantum simulation, and precision measurement. The demonstrated narrow-line Doppler imaging may also be applied in tweezer arrays or quantum gas microscopes using other atoms with similar transitions, such as erbium and dysprosium.
The motion of atoms in programmable optical tweezer arrays offers many new opportunities for neutral atom quantum science. These include inter- and intra-site atom motion for resource-efficient implementations of fermionic and bosonic modes, respectively, as well as tweezer transport for efficient compilation of arbitrary circuits. However, the exploitation of atomic motion for all three purposes and others is limited by the inertia of the atoms. We present a comprehensive architectural blueprint for the use of fermionic metastable helium-3 (3^33He∗^*∗) atoms -- the lightest trappable atomic species -- in programmable optical tweezer arrays. This includes a concrete analysis of atomic structure considerations as well as Rydberg-mediated interactions. We show that inter-tweezer hopping of 3^33He∗^*∗ atoms can be ≳3×\gtrsim3\times≳3× faster than previous demonstrations with lithium-6. We also demonstrate a new toolbox for encoding and manipulating qubits directly in the tweezer trap potential, uniquely enabled by the light mass of 3^33He∗^*∗. Finally, we provide several examples of new opportunities for fermionic quantum simulation and computation that leverage the transport and inter-tweezer hopping of 3^33He∗^*∗ atom arrays. These tools present new methods to improve the resource efficiency of neutral atom quantum science that may also enable quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories and quantum chemistry outside the Born-Oppenheimer approximation