Circumventing AC Tweezers With Single Sodium Atoms

Optical trapping and manipulation of individual neutral atoms in tweezer arrays have proved central to recent advances in studies of many-body physics, precision measurement, and metrology. Trapping and imaging of single atoms require efficient cooling of the atoms into the tweezer trap while scattering photons during imaging. This can be challenging for atoms like sodium, where the excited states can become anti-trapping in red-detuned light, so to date, single sodium atoms have only been trapped by temporally alternating between the cooling light and tweezer light. Such an "AC tweezer" method, however, increases demands on the optical tweezer power per trap and limits the total number of tweezer traps in an array. Here, we report the demonstration of DC trapping and imaging of a tweezer array of sodium atoms, thereby circumventing the need for AC tweezers and increasing the scalability of atom arrays.