Atomic & Molecular Physics

Our recent manuscripts on tweezer programmable quantum walks and optical clock Bell states were published in Science and Nature Physics. You can read more about these experiments here. 

Both of these experiments relied on some new technology we developed for interfacing optical tweezer arrays and optical lattices. This approach was recently highlight here, in a piece by Giulia Semeghini. 

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.