Estimating applied potentials in cold atom lattice simulators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical protocol for accurately measuring arbitrary site-dependent potentials in cold atom optical lattices, enhancing the precision of quantum simulations.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel, efficient method using interaction tuning and snapshot data to precisely estimate potentials in cold atom systems, overcoming calibration challenges.

Findings

Protocol achieves high-precision potential estimation

Robust against state preparation errors

Applicable to arbitrary potentials in quantum simulation

Abstract

Cold atoms in optical lattices are a versatile and highly controllable platform for quantum simulation, capable of realizing a broad family of Hubbard models, and allowing site-resolved readout via quantum gas microscopes. In principle, arbitrary site-dependent potentials can also be implemented; however, since lattice spacings are typically below the diffraction limit, precisely applying and calibrating these potentials remains challenging. Here, we propose a simple and efficient experimental protocol that can be used to measure any potential with high precision. The key ingredient in our protocol is the ability in some atomic species to turn off interactions using a Feshbach resonance, which makes the evolution easy to compute. Given this, we demonstrate that collecting snapshots from the time evolution of a known, easily prepared initial state is sufficient to accurately estimate the potential. Our protocol is robust to state preparation errors and uncertainty in the hopping rate. This paves the way toward precision quantum simulation with arbitrary potentials.