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Scalable Neutral-Atom Tweezer Arrays Based on TiO2 Holographic Metasurfaces

Zezheng Zhu, Yuan Xu, Aaron Holman, Jiahao Wu, Ximo Sun, Mingxuan Wang, Bojeong Seo, Sebastian Will, Nanfang Yu

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate trapping of ~1,000 individual strontium atoms and an optical tweezer array with 360,000 trapping sites using TiO 2 holographic metasurfaces with a diameter of only a few millimeters and high power-handling capabilities.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_si.2026.sm1k.2

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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.
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