Towards a 171Yb atom array in a near-concentric cavity

Neutral atom arrays have been demonstrated to be a promising architecture for quantum computing. In particular, 171-ytterbium has been shown to be an excellent atomic species for computation due to its nuclear spin of 1/2. We expand upon this architecture by adding an optical cavity that strongly couples to the atomic array, thereby enabling high fidelity readout at readout times close to 3 orders of magnitude faster than the typical few 10s of milliseconds. Moreover, the cavity can be used to enhance the collection of photons on the telecom transition for sending quantum information between nodes in a quantum network to a second computation node. In this talk, we discuss our designs of the platform to support both functionalities. We use a Fabry-Perot cavity in the near-concentric geometry, which would create a tightly focused spot of waist radius roughly 13 (21) μm at a wavelength of 556 (1390) nm. We have generated a MOT in this system and are working towards trapping atoms in a clock-magic tweezer array. We will describe our progress in exploring this novel cavity QED system atom-by-atom.