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Optics Express

Metasurface optical trap array for single atoms

Ruiting Huang, Feng Lei Zhou, Xiao Li, Peng Xu, Yi Wang, Mingsheng Zhan

Published May 14, 2024• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Metasurfaces made of subwavelength silicon nanopillars provide unparalleled capacity to manipulate light, and have emerged as one of the leading platforms for developing integrated photonic devices. In this study, we report on a compact, passive approach based on planar metasurface optics to generate large optical trap arrays. The unique configuration is achieved with a meta-hologram to convert a single incident laser beam into an array of individual beams, followed up with a metalens to form multiple laser foci for single rubidium atom trapping. We experimentally demonstrate two-dimensional arrays of 5 × 5 and 25 × 25 at the wavelength of 830 nm, validating the capability and scalability of our metasurface design. Beam waists ∼1.5 µm, spacings (about 15 µm), and low trap depth variations (8%) of relevance to quantum control for an atomic array are achieved in a robust and efficient fashion. The presented work highlights a compact, stable, and scalable trap array platform well-suitable for Rydberg-state mediated quantum gate operations, which will further facilitate advances in neutral atom quantum computing.

DOI
10.1364/oe.525454

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Metasurfaces made of subwavelength silicon nanopillars provide unparalleled capacity to manipulate light, and have emerged as one of the leading platforms for developing integrated photonic devices. In this study, we report on a compact, passive approach based on planar metasurface optics to generate large optical trap arrays. The unique configuration is achieved with a meta-hologram to convert a single incident laser beam into an array of individual beams, followed up with a metalens to form multiple laser foci for single rubidium atom trapping. We experimentally demonstrate two-dimensional arrays of 5 × 5 and 25 × 25 at the wavelength of 830 nm, validating the capability and scalability of our metasurface design. Beam waists ∼1.5 µm, spacings (about 15 µm), and low trap depth variations (8%) of relevance to quantum control for an atomic array are achieved in a robust and efficient fashion. The presented work highlights a compact, stable, and scalable trap array platform well-suitable for Rydberg-state mediated quantum gate operations, which will further facilitate advances in neutral atom quantum computing.
Trapped neutral atoms are one of the leading platforms for quantum information technologies, in particular for quantum computing, but scaling them to array sizes needed for utility-scale quantum computing is a major engineering challenge. Here we review optical metasurfaces as an enabling technology that provides fine control over the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light, with pixel counts far exceeding what is available with spatial light modulators (SLMs) and other active devices. The large pixel counts have recently led to demonstrations of arrays of optical tweezers with hundreds of thousands of sites and arrays of optical bottle-beams with complex three-dimensional trapping profiles. The flexibility and scalability of optical metasurfaces provides a route towards miniaturized, integrated, and highly scalable atomic experiments and instruments.
Scalability remains a major challenge in building practical fault-tolerant quantum computers. Currently, the largest number of qubits achieved across leading quantum platforms ranges from hundreds to thousands. In atom arrays, scalability is primarily constrained by the capacity to generate large numbers of optical tweezers, and conventional techniques using acousto-optic deflectors or spatial light modulators struggle to produce arrays much beyond ∼10,000\sim 10,000∼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 280×280280\times 280280×280 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%90\%90%, making it suitable for homogeneous single-atom loading and paving the way for trapping arrays of more than 10,00010,00010,000 atoms in the near future.
Optical tweezer arrays of laser-cooled and individual controlled particles have revolutionized the atomic, molecular and optical physics, and they afford exquisite capabilities for applications in quantum simulation of many-body physics, quantum computation and quantum sensing. Underlying this development is the technical maturity of generating scalable optical beams, enabled by active components and high numerical aperture objective. However, such a complex combination of bulk optics outside the vacuum chamber is very sensitive to any vibration and drift. Here we demonstrate the generation of 3*3 static tweezer array with a single chip-scale multifunctional metasurface element in vacuum, replacing the meter-long free space optics. Fluorescence counts on the camera validates the successfully trapping of the atomic ensemble array. Further, we discuss the strategy to achieve low scattering and crosstalk, where a metasurface design featuring dual-wavelength independent control is included. Our results, together with other recent development in integrated photonics for cold atoms, could pave the way for compact and portable quantum sensors and simulators in platforms of neutral atom arrays.
Optical metasurfaces of subwavelength pillars have provided new capabilities for the versatile definition of the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light.In this work, we demonstrate that an efficient dielectric metasurface lens can be used to trap and image single neutral atoms with a long working distance from the lens of 3 mm.We characterize the high-numerical-aperture optical tweezers using the trapped atoms and compare with numerical computations of the metasurface-lens performance.We predict that future metasurfaces for atom trapping will be able to leverage multiple ongoing developments in metasurface design and enable multifunctional control in complex quantum information experiments with neutral-atom arrays.
Optical tweezer arrays of laser-cooled and individually controlled particles have revolutionized atomic, molecular, and optical physics. They afford exquisite capabilities for applications in quantum simulation of many-body physics, quantum computation, and sensing. Underlying this development is the technical maturity of generating scalable optical beams, enabled by active components and a high numerical aperture objective. However, such a complex combination of bulk optics outside the vacuum chamber is very sensitive to any vibration and drift. Here, we demonstrate the generation of a 3 × 3 static tweezer array with a single chip-scale multifunctional metasurface element in vacuum, replacing the meter-long free space optics. Fluorescence counts on the camera validate the successful trapping of the atomic ensemble array and showcase a promising strategy for integrated photonics with cold atom systems. The introduction of a polarization independent dual-wavelength metasurface significantly enhances fluorescence collection efficiency while reducing experimental complexity. This approach paves the way for scalable neutral atom platforms and offers a compelling route towards the realization of next generation quantum metasurfaces.
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.