Deborah Jin Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics Recipient: Programmable arrays of alkaline earth atoms: qubits, clocks, and the Bose-Hubbard model

Neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezer arrays have emerged as a promising platform for analog quantum simulations of spin models, and for proof-of-principle demonstrations of quantum computing. I will discuss how we apply the programmable control provided by optical tweezer arrays to new domains in quantum science by extending the optical tweezer toolbox to new atomic species (namely alkaline earth atoms), and by interfacing optical tweezers with a Hubbard-regime optical lattice. With these new capabilities, we demonstrate advancements in optical frequency metrology, including the generation of metrologically useful entangled states, and in simulations of itinerant systems where identical particles are free to coherently tunnel and exchange positions, including in state-of-the-art demonstrations of boson sampling.