Preparation of hundreds of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezer arrays

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the creation of large, highly uniform two-dimensional arrays of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezers, enabling scalable quantum simulation and information processing with controllable atom numbers.

Contribution

It introduces a method for directly projecting high-resolution light patterns onto an optical pancake trap to load large atomic arrays efficiently with low fluctuations.

Findings

Over 400 sites with nearly uniform filling

Atomic ensembles with 20 to 200 atoms each

Sub-Poissonian atom number fluctuations

Abstract

We present programmable two-dimensional arrays of microscopic atomic ensembles consisting of more than 400 sites with nearly uniform filling and small atom number fluctuations. Our approach involves direct projection of light patterns from a digital micromirror device with high spatial resolution onto an optical pancake trap acting as a reservoir. This makes it possible to load large arrays of tweezers in a single step with high occupation numbers and low power requirements per tweezer. Each atomic ensemble is confined to $\sim 1\,\mu$m$^3$ with a controllable occupation from 20 to 200 atoms and with (sub)-Poissonian atom number fluctuations. Thus they are ideally suited for quantum simulation and for realizing large arrays of collectively encoded Rydberg-atom qubits for quantum information processing.