Towards a modular experiment for variable optical traps from single-atom qubits to condensates

Neutral atoms trapped in optical potentials have emerged as a promising platform for Quantum Technologies to study a rich spectrum of applications, including quantum metrology, quantum computation, and quantum simulation of many-body systems. The choice of application often dictates specific engineering solutions, which rapidly becomes a time-consuming and expensive task with the growing sophistication of the platform. Here we introduce a modularized, compact design for single atoms trapped in a tweezer array alongside a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), and report on the progress of its build-up.

We employ two basic ideas in our design: customized optomechanical parts for compactness and stability; and division of the setup into standardized and interchangeable modules that can be easily duplicated on new machines. Here we focus on two modules: a source cell with a 2D MOT, and a science breadboard with tweezer and BEC optics. We are preparing a few variations of the science breadboard, allowing us to perform multiple types of experiments simply by swapping the breadboard module.

The tweezer array with Rydberg gates and individual addressing will be used to study the metrological qubit readout proposed in ref [1]. We also plan to build a tweezer array alongside a BEC to implement a collective CNOT gate based on EIT, to implement metrology protocols such as DQC1, or to study the coupling of a pure quantum system to a bath.