Realizing distance-selective interactions in a Rydberg-dressed atom array

Neutral atoms trapped in optical lattices or optical tweezers are an appealing platform for quantum computing. Atomic ground states are well suited to store quantum information, and entanglement can be created by coupling to highly excited Rydberg states. Typically, Rydberg interactions feature long-range tails, which complicate the isolation of pairs of atoms during the required two-qubit gate operations. Here, we employ off-resonant laser coupling of molecular potentials between Rydberg atom pairs to engineer interactions that are strongly peaked in distance. We verify the resulting “Rydberg-dressed” interactions between ground state atoms using many-body Ramsey interferometry in a quantum gas microscope. We identify atom loss and coupling to continuum modes as the main limitation of our present scheme and outline paths to mitigate these effects, thereby paving the way towards the parallelized creation of large-scale entanglement.