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Our first paper from the Ytterbium tweezer project has been published in PRX! We show rapid control of the nuclear-spin qubit, T1 on 10 to 100 second timescales, and T2 times of several seconds. We also harness the narrow transitions in Yb to perform near-deterministic loading and ground-state cooling. See also follow up synopsis in Physics here.

In January, we posted our first demonstration of a new concept for tweezer-programmable optical lattices. Using tweezers with spatial scale on the order of 400 nm, we can program the dynamics and Hamiltonian with single lattice site resolution. We use resolved-sideband cooling to prepare the atoms at extremely low temperatures. From these conditions, we demonstrate for the first time the implementation of a spatial search algorithm originally proposed by Childs and Goldstone. Andrew Childs collaborated with us on this project, and we expect interesting extensions down the line to multi-particle search algorithms.  

In the past month, the group has put up two new preprints.

- In the strontium experiment, we report the generation of entangled Bell states, prepared in optical clock qubits, whose phase coherence persists for more than 4 seconds. This uses a gate scheme proposed by M. Martin and I. Deutsch, based on Rydberg-mediated interactions. See the preprint here.

- On the Ytterbium experiment, we report our first results preparing, controlling, and detecting arrays of nuclear spin qubits of 171Yb. We observe high fidelity control with sub-microsecond pulse times. We also demonstrate low-entropy array preparation through deterministic loading techniques via the use of narrow-line transitions and Raman-sideband cooling to near the motional ground state. See the preprint here.

Our paper on high power light sources at magic wavelengths for neutral atom optical atomic clocks is published in RSI! https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0057619

In this work, we showed half-minute scale coherence in a tweezer clock of 150 atoms, demonstrated high relative stability, and established new methods for scaling ultracold arrays of neutral atoms. Congratulations to the team! See also: The Nature highlight on our work and the recent entangled optical clock paper from the Vuletić group; and, NIST highlight.

Congratulations Will!

In this most recent paper, we show how to scale tweezer arrays to 320 sites, while maintaining atomic coherence at the half-minute-scale. This allows us to reach excellent stability through frequency self-comparisons in the array, as well as to characterize the single-particle coherence in the array through correlation measurements.

Our paper was published in science; you can find it here. See also the news highlight by NIST: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/09/jilas-novel-atomic-clock-design-offers-tweezer-control

We've recently posted our new paper in which we benchmark the performance of optical tweezer arrays of strontium for optical atomic clocks and quantum state control!

We recently posted our first paper on arxiv! We demonstrate tweezer-trapping, single-particle imaging, light-shift free spectroscopy, and three-dimensional ground-state cooling of strontium!