Erasure-cooling, control, and hyper-entanglement of motion in optical tweezers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates advanced control of atomic motion in optical tweezers, including ground state cooling, mid-circuit operations, and hyper-entanglement, enabling new quantum information applications.

Contribution

It introduces a species-agnostic erasure-based cooling method that surpasses traditional sideband cooling and achieves hyper-entanglement of atomic motion and optical states.

Findings

Achieved motional ground state cooling via erasure mechanism

Demonstrated mid-circuit readout and erasure detection

Generated hyper-entanglement of motion and optical qubits

Abstract

Coherently controlling the motion of single atoms in optical tweezers would enable new applications in quantum information science. To demonstrate this, we first prepare atoms in their motional ground state using a species-agnostic cooling mechanism that converts motional excitations into erasures -- errors with a known location. This cooling mechanism fundamentally outperforms idealized traditional sideband cooling, which we experimentally demonstrate. By coherently manipulating the resultant pure motional state, we perform mid-circuit readout and mid-circuit erasure detection via local shelving into motional superposition states. We finally entangle the motion of two atoms in separate tweezers and generate hyper-entanglement by preparing a simultaneous Bell state of motional and optical qubits, unlocking a large new class of quantum operations with neutral atoms.