TY - JOUR
AU - M. Brown
AU - Tobias Thiele
AU - Chris Kiehl
AU - Ting-Wei Hsu
AU - Cindy Regal
AB - To isolate individual neutral atoms in microtraps, experimenters have long harnessed molecular photoassociation to make atom distributions sub-Poissonian. While a variety of approaches have used a combination of attractive (red-detuned) and repulsive (blue-detuned) molecular states, to date all experiments have been predicated on red-detuned cooling. In our work, we present a shifted perspective\textemdashnamely, the efficient way to capture single atoms is to eliminate red-detuned light in the loading stage and use bluedetuned light that both cools the atoms and precisely controls trap loss through the amount of energy released during atom-atom collisions in the photoassociation process. Subsequent application of reddetuned light then assures the preparation of maximally one atom in the trap. Using Λ-enhanced graymolasses for loading, we study and model the molecular processes and find we can trap single atoms with 90\% probability even in a very shallow optical tweezer. Using 100 traps loaded with 80\% probability, we demonstrate one example of the power of enhanced loading by assembling a grid of 36 atoms using only a single move of rows and columns in 2D. Our insight is key in scaling the number of particles in a bottom-up quantum simulation and computation with atoms, or even molecules.
BT - Physical Review X
DA - 2019-03
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevX.9.011057
N2 - To isolate individual neutral atoms in microtraps, experimenters have long harnessed molecular photoassociation to make atom distributions sub-Poissonian. While a variety of approaches have used a combination of attractive (red-detuned) and repulsive (blue-detuned) molecular states, to date all experiments have been predicated on red-detuned cooling. In our work, we present a shifted perspective\textemdashnamely, the efficient way to capture single atoms is to eliminate red-detuned light in the loading stage and use bluedetuned light that both cools the atoms and precisely controls trap loss through the amount of energy released during atom-atom collisions in the photoassociation process. Subsequent application of reddetuned light then assures the preparation of maximally one atom in the trap. Using Λ-enhanced graymolasses for loading, we study and model the molecular processes and find we can trap single atoms with 90\% probability even in a very shallow optical tweezer. Using 100 traps loaded with 80\% probability, we demonstrate one example of the power of enhanced loading by assembling a grid of 36 atoms using only a single move of rows and columns in 2D. Our insight is key in scaling the number of particles in a bottom-up quantum simulation and computation with atoms, or even molecules.
PY - 2019
EP - 011057
T2 - Physical Review X
TI - Gray-Molasses Optical-Tweezer Loading: Controlling Collisions for Scaling Atom-Array Assembly
UR - https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.011057
VL - 9
ER -