Construction of a cryogenic ytterbium tweezer platform for quantum computing

Here we present our progress on the construction of a cryogenic optical tweezer array of ytterbium 171 atoms for quantum computing and information processing applications. Alkaline-Earth-like atoms, such as ytterbium, are promising candidates for scalable quantum computing architectures due to their rich level structures, which enable a wide variety of optical control and qubit readout schemes. Furthermore, ytterbium 171 has the attractive property that it has nuclear spin-½. We aim to improve vacuum lifetime and single-particle coherence times as well as reach a suppression of blackbody radiation for Rydberg excitation by implementing a fully shielded cryogenic box around the atoms. Currently, vacuum losses and blackbody radiation limit the loading fidelity and fidelity of Rydberg gates. We expect that vacuum lifetime improves from the currently typical minute timescales to hours and blackbody radiation effects become negligible. We will achieve single atom imaging and addressing in the tweezers via a high NA objective, and have already constructed the vacuum chamber and demonstrated the first cooling stages. The flexible nature of our platform will enable several complementary approaches to quantum computation, including measurement-based quantum computing via the creation of cluster states, as well as the more traditional approach using Rydberg gates.