An official website of the United States government
Optically trapped neutral atoms are one of several leading approaches for scalable quantum information processing. When prepared in electronic ground states in deep optical lattices atomic qubits are weakly interacting with long coherence times. Excitation to Rydberg states turns on strong interactions which enable fast gates and entanglement generation. I will present quantum logic experiments with a 2D array of blue detuned lines that traps more than 100 Cesium atom qubits. The array is randomly loaded from a MOT and an optical tweezer steered by a 2D acousto-optic deflector is used to ll subregions of the array. Progress towards high fidelity entangling gates based on Rydberg excitation lasers with lower noise, and optimized optical polarization and magnetic eld settings will be shown.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
High Optical Access Cryogenic System for Rydberg Atom Arrays with a 3000-Second Trap Lifetime
We present an optical tweezer array of 87Rb atoms housed in an cryogenic environment that successfully combines a 4-K cryopumping surface, a <50-K cold box surrounding the atoms, and a room-temperature high-numerical-aperture objective lens. We demonstrate a 3000-s atom-trap lifetime, which enables us to optimize and measure losses at the 10−4 level that arise during imaging and cooling, which are important to array rearrangement. We perform both ground-state qubit manipulation with an integrated microwave antenna and two-photon coherent Rydberg control, with the local electric field tuned to zero via inte- grated electrodes. We anticipate that the reduced blackbody radiation at the atoms from the cryogenic environment, combined with future electrical shielding, should decrease the rate of undesired transitions to nearby strongly interacting Rydberg states, which cause many-body loss and impede Rydberg gates. This low-vibration, high-optical-access cryogenic platform can be used with a wide range of optically trapped atomic or molecular species for applications in quantum computing, simulation, and metrology.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2210527
- PAR ID:
- 10654637
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Physical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PRX Quantum
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2691-3399
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
We present recent progress towards building a neutral atom quantum computer. We use a new design for a blue-detuned optical lattice to trap single Cs atoms. The lattice is created using a combination of diffractive elements and acousto-optic deflectors (AODs) which give a reconfigurable set of cross-hatched lines. By using AODs, we can vary the number of traps and size of the trapping regions as well as eliminate extraneous traps in Talbot planes. Since this trap uses blue-detuned light, it traps both ground state atoms and atoms excited to the Rydberg state; moreover, by tuning the size of the trapping region, we can make the traps “magic” for a selected Rydberg state. We use an optical tweezer beam for atom rearrangement. When loading atoms into the array, trap sites randomly contain zero or one atoms. Atoms are then moved between different trapping sites using a red-detuned optical tweezer. Optimal atom rearrangement is calculated using the “Hungarian Method”. These rearrangement techniques can be used to create defect-free sub-lattices. Lattice atoms can also be used as a reservoir for a set of selected sites. This allows quick replacement of atoms, and increased data rate, without reloading from a MOT.more » « less
-
We present recent progress towards building a neutral atom quantum computer. We use a new design for a blue-detuned optical lattice to trap single Cs atoms. The lattice is created using a combination of diffractive elements and acousto-optic deflectors (AODs) which give a reconfigurable set of cross-hatched lines. By using AODs, we can vary the number of traps and size of the trapping regions as well as eliminate extraneous traps in Talbot planes. Since this trap uses blue-detuned light, it traps both ground state atoms and atoms excited to the Rydberg state; moreover, by tuning the size of the trapping region, we can make the traps “magic” for a selected Rydberg state. We use an optical tweezer beam for atom rearrangement. When loading atoms into the array, trap sites randomly contain zero or one atoms. Atoms are then moved between different trapping sites using a red-detuned optical tweezer. Optimal atom rearrangement is calculated using the “Hungarian Method”. These rearrangement techniques can be used to create defect-free sub-lattices. Lattice atoms can also be used as a reservoir for a set of selected sites. This allows quick replacement of atoms, and increased data rate, without reloading from a MOT.more » « less
-
We report a high-finesse bow-tie cavity designed for atomic physics experiments with Rydberg atom arrays. The cavity has a finesse of 51,000 and a waist of 7.1μm at the cesium D2 line (852 nm). With these parameters, the cavity is expected to induce strong coupling between a single atom and a single photon, corresponding to a cooperativity per traveling mode of 35 at the cavity waist. To trap and image atoms, the cavity setup utilizes two in-vacuum aspheric lenses with a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.35 and is capable of housingNA = 0.5 microscope objectives. In addition, the large atom-mirror distance ( cm) provides good optical access and minimizes stray electric fields at the position of the atoms. This cavity setup can operate in tandem with a Rydberg array platform, creating a fully connected system for quantum simulation and computation.more » « less
-
We investigate the interaction of weak light fields with two-dimensional lattices of atoms with high lying atomic Rydberg states. This system features different interactions that act on disparate length scales, from zero-range defect scattering of atomic excitations and finite-range dipole exchange processes to long-range Rydberg-state interactions, which span the entire array and can block multiple Rydberg excitations. Analyzing their interplay, we identify conditions that yield a nonlinear quantum mirror which coherently splits incident fields into correlated photon-pairs in a single transverse mode, while transmitting single photons unaffected. In particular, we find strong anti-bunching of the transmitted light with equal-time pair correlations that decrease exponentially with an increasing range of the Rydberg blockade. Such strong photon-photon interactions in the absence of photon losses open up promising avenues for the generation and manipulation of quantum light, and the exploration of many-body phenomena with interacting photons.more » « less
