Neutral atom transport and transfer between optical tweezers

TL;DR

This paper develops optimized pulse protocols, including Shortcuts to Adiabaticity, for neutral atom transport in optical tweezers, significantly reducing transfer times and errors, thus advancing quantum processor and simulator implementations.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic optimization of transport pulses using STA techniques, outperforming existing methods and setting new speed benchmarks for atom transfer in optical tweezers.

Findings

STA protocol outperforms traditional pulses in error and heating measures.

Lower bound for transfer time is 9 times faster than current experiments.

Optimized pulses enable high-fidelity, rapid atom transfer with minimized vibrational excitations.

Abstract

We focus on the optimization of neutral atom transport and transfer between optical tweezers, both critical steps towards the implementation of quantum processors and simulators. We consider four different types of experimentally relevant pulses: piece-wise linear, piece-wise quadratic, minimum jerk, and a family of hybrid linear and minimum jerk ramps. We also develop a protocol using Shortcuts to Adiabaticity (STA) techniques that allows us to include the effects of static traps. By computing a measure of the error after transport and two measures of the heating for transient times, we provide a systematic characterization of the performance of all the considered pulses and show that our proposed STA protocol outperforms the experimentally inspired pulses. After pulse shape optimization we find a lower threshold for the total time of the protocol that is compatible with the limit below which the increase in the vibrational excitations exceeds half of the amount of states hosted by the moving tweezer. Since the obtained lower bound for the atom capturing or releasing stage is 9 times faster than the one reported in state-of-the-art experiments, we interpret our results as a wake-up call towards the importance of the inclusion and optimization of the transfer between tweezers, which may be the largest bottleneck to speed. For the two pulses having the best performance (minimum jerk and STA), we determine optimal regions in the experimentally accessible parameters to implement high fidelity transport pulses. Finally, our STA results prove that a modulation in the depth of the moving tweezer designed to counteract the effect of the static traps reduces errors and allows for shorter pulse duration. To motivate the use of our STA pulse in future experiments, we provide a simple analytical approximation for the tweezer position and depth controls.