High-resolution spectroscopy and single-photon Rydberg excitation of reconfigurable ytterbium atom tweezer arrays utilizing a metastable state

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates high-resolution spectroscopy and single-photon Rydberg excitation in reconfigurable ytterbium atom tweezer arrays, enabling advanced quantum simulation and computation with ultracold atoms.

Contribution

The authors develop a system for manipulating and exciting ytterbium atoms in tweezer arrays using metastable states and single-photon Rydberg excitation, advancing quantum control techniques.

Findings

Successful high-resolution spectroscopy of ${}^1$S$_0$ and ${}^3$P$_2$ states.

Single-photon excitation to Rydberg states achieved.

Observation of new ${}^3$D$_3$ energy states.

Abstract

We present an experimental system for Rydberg tweezer arrays with ytterbium (Yb) atoms featuring internal state manipulation between the ground ${}^1$S$_0$ and the metastable ${}^3$P$_2$ states, and single-photon excitation from the ${}^3$P$_2$ to Rydberg states. In the experiments, single Yb atoms are trapped in two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers and are detected by fluorescence imaging with the intercombination ${}^1$S$_0 \leftrightarrow {}^3$P$_1$ transition, and the defect-free single atom arrays are prepared by the rearrangement with the feedaback. We successfully perform high-resolution ${}^1$S$_0\leftrightarrow {}^3$P$_2$ state spectroscopy for the single atoms, demonstrating the utilities of this ultranarrow transition. We further perform single-photon excitation from the ${}^3$P$_2$ to Rydberg states for the single atoms, which is a key for the efficient Rydberg excitation. We also perform a systematic measurement of a complex energy structure of a series of D states including newly observed ${}^3$D$_3$ states. The developed system shows feasibility of future experiments towards quantum simulations and computations using single Yb atoms.