Preparing and Entangling Laser-cooled Molecules in a Reconfigurable Optical Tweezer Array

Ultracold molecules, with their rich internal structure and long-ranged interactions in long-lived states, have been proposed as a versatile platform for quantum science. In this talk, I will report on recent work in our group on manipulating and controlling laser-cooled molecules in optical tweezer arrays. In particular, I will discuss our explorations in creating arbitrary 1D arrays of single CaF molecules and initializing their internal states, and our recent observations of coherent dipolar interactions between spatially separated pairs of molecules. The dipolar interactions give rise to effective spin-exchange interactions, which we harness to create entangled Bell pairs of molecules on-demand. Our Bell pair generation sequence can be interpreted as implementing an entangling 2-qubit gate, which, combined with local control available in optical tweezer experiments, could allow for digital quantum computing with molecular qubits. In addition to quantum information processing, our observation of effective spin-exchange interactions also lay the groundwork for simulating a variety of quantum spin models using molecular tweezer arrays. With the capability of microscopic readout and the ability to create arbitrary trapping geometries, molecular tweezer arrays could be powerful new platform to study these models in a bottom-up approach.