Preparation of hundreds of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezer arrays

Abstract:

We present programmable two-dimensional arrays of microscopic atomic ensembles consisting of more than 400 sites with nearly uniform filling and small atom number fluctuations. Our approach involves direct projection of light patterns from a digital micromirror device with high spatial resolution onto an optical pancake trap acting as a reservoir. This makes it possible to load large arrays of tweezers in a single step with high occupation numbers and low power requirements per tweezer. Each atomic ensemble is confined to ~1 μm³ with a controllable occupation from 20 to 200 atoms and with (sub)-Poissonian atom number fluctuations. Thus, they are ideally suited for quantum simulation and for realizing large arrays of collectively encoded Rydberg-atom qubits for quantum information processing.

Y. Wang, S. Shevate, T. M. Wintermantel, M. Morgado, G. Lochead, S. Whitlock, “Preparation of hundreds of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezer arrays”, npj Quantum Information 6 (2020).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-020-0285-1

Related to Project A05