Rescheduled from Tuesday, February 12
Alexandre Cooper-Roy, Caltech
Single neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers have become a powerful hardware for quantum information science and technology; however, these techniques have been so far restricted to alkali atoms. Applying tweezer techniques to alkaline-earth atoms, which are used in the most precise atomic clocks, would enable many new experiments in quantum computation, quantum simulation, and precision metrology. In this talk, I will lay the groundwork for such future experiments by presenting new results demonstrating the trapping, cooling, and imaging of individual alkaline-earth atoms in two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers.
First, I will introduce a narrow-line cooling mechanism that allows for compensating for heating during fluorescence imaging over a wide range of trapping parameters. Then, I will demonstrate cooling of single atoms close to their motional ground state using resolved sideband cooling. Finally, I will describe our approach to perform repetitive non-destructive imaging of single atoms with a fidelity greater than 99.99% for more than a thousand times.
These results pave the way for an entire spectrum of experiments with quantum many-body systems assembled from individually controlled alkaline-earth atoms, including the realization of quantum-enhanced optical clocks and the creation of highly-entangled states using Rydberg-mediated interactions.
References
A. Cooper, J. P. Covey, I. S. Madjarov, S. G. Porsev, M. S. Safronova, M. Endres.听鈥淎lkaline earth atoms in optical tweezers.鈥澛, featured as a聽.听
J. P. Covey, I. S. Madjarov, A. Cooper, M. Endres.听鈥2000-times repeated imaging of strontium atoms in clock-magic tweezer arrays.鈥澛.
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