Spin squeezing in ensembles of neutral atoms via Rydberg dressing

Engineering quantum entanglement provides a powerful route towards enhanced precision measurement of time, electromagnetic fields, and acceleration. While past experiments have focused on leveraging all-to-all interactions to generate metrologically useful entanglement, many promising platforms for metrology more naturally offer short-ranged interactions which drop off with distance. One such platform, neutral atoms interacting via Rydberg dressing, offers coherent optical control over local interactions, and has been theoretically proposed to generate metrologically useful entanglement in the form of squeezed spin states [1]. In this talk, we present the creation of spin-squeezed ensembles of neutral atoms via coherent Rydberg dressing, achieving a factor of up to 0.77(4) reduction in phase variance below the standard quantum limit. Additionally, we realize metrological gain across five spatially separated ensembles in parallel. This work demonstrates the potential of local interactions not only to enhance the precision of atomic tweezer clocks via Rydberg interactions, but also to offer simultaneous enhancement of both sensitivity and spatial resolution for quantum sensing.

[1] L.I.R. Gil, et. al. Spin Squeezing in a Rydberg Lattice Clock. Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 103601 (2014).