Autoionization-enhanced Rydberg dressing by fast contaminant removal

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using autoionization to rapidly remove contaminant Rydberg states, significantly extending the lifetime and coherence of Rydberg-dressed atomic systems for quantum applications.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a novel autoionization technique for contaminant removal that enhances Rydberg dressing lifetimes and coherence in large atomic arrays.

Findings

Lifetimes increased by an order of magnitude with AI pulses.

Maintained larger duty cycles compared to previous methods.

Improved spin-squeezing during dressing dynamics.

Abstract

Rydberg dressing is a powerful tool for entanglement generation in long-lived atomic states. While already employed effectively in several demonstrations, a key challenge for this technique is the collective loss triggered by blackbody-radiation-driven transitions to contaminant Rydberg states of opposite parity. We demonstrate the rapid removal of such contaminants using autoionization (AI) transitions found in alkaline-earth-like atoms. The AI is shown to be compatible with coherent operation of an array of optical clock qubits. By incorporating AI pulses into a stroboscopic Rydberg dressing (SRD) sequence, we enhance lifetimes by an order of magnitude for system sizes of up to 144 atoms, while maintaining an order of magnitude larger duty cycle than previously achieved. To highlight the utility of our approach, we use the AI-enhanced SRD protocol to improve the degree of spin-squeezing achieved during early-time dressing dynamics. These results bring Rydberg dressing lifetimes closer to fundamental limits, opening the door to previously infeasible dressing proposals.