Entanglement of two individual neutral atoms using Rydberg blockade

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the creation of entanglement between two individual neutral atoms using Rydberg blockade, achieving high fidelity and rapid generation in a controlled optical tweezer setup.

Contribution

The authors experimentally realize entanglement of two neutral atoms via Rydberg blockade with high fidelity and rapid operation, advancing quantum information processing capabilities.

Findings

Entanglement generated in 200 ns using pulsed two-photon excitation.

Fidelity of the entangled state is 0.75.

61% of atom pairs remain after the entangling sequence.

Abstract

We report the generation of entanglement between two individual $^{87}$Rb atoms in hyperfine ground states $|F=1,M=1>$ and $|F=2,M=2>$ which are held in two optical tweezers separated by 4 $\mu$m. Our scheme relies on the Rydberg blockade effect which prevents the simultaneous excitation of the two atoms to a Rydberg state. The entangled state is generated in about 200 ns using pulsed two-photon excitation. We quantify the entanglement by applying global Raman rotations on both atoms. We measure that 61% of the initial pairs of atoms are still present at the end of the entangling sequence. These pairs are in the target entangled state with a fidelity of 0.75.