Field-sensitive addressing and control of field-insensitive neutral-atom qubits

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method to selectively address and control individual neutral-atom qubits in a lattice using a spatially inhomogeneous external field, enabling precise quantum operations without disturbing neighboring qubits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 'optical MRI' technique for selecting and controlling field-insensitive qubits in neutral-atom lattices, advancing scalable quantum computing.

Findings

Successful single-qubit rotations at selected lattice sites

Minimal perturbation to unselected qubits during addressing

Robust control of neutral-atom qubits using inhomogeneous fields

Abstract

The establishment of a scalable scheme for quantum computing with addressable and long-lived qubits would be a scientific watershed, harnessing the laws of quantum physics to solve classically intractable problems. The design of many proposed quantum computational platforms is driven by competing needs: isolating the quantum system from the environment to prevent decoherence, and easily and accurately controlling the system with external fields. For example, neutral-atom optical-lattice architectures provide environmental isolation through the use of states that are robust against fluctuating external fields, yet external fields are essential for qubit addressing. Here we demonstrate the selection of individual qubits with external fields, despite the fact that the qubits are in field-insensitive superpositions. We use a spatially inhomogeneous external field to map selected qubits to a different field-insensitive superposition ("optical MRI"), minimally perturbing unselected qubits, despite the fact that the addressing field is not spatially localized. We show robust single-qubit rotations on neutral-atom qubits located at selected lattice sites. This precise coherent control is an important step forward for lattice-based neutral-atom quantum computation, and is quite generally applicable to state transfer and qubit isolation in other architectures using field-insensitive qubits.