Quantum Computation and Simulation with Neutral Alkaline-Earth-like Ytterbium Rydberg Atoms in Optical Tweezer Arrays

Arrays of individually trapped neutral atoms have evolved into a rapidly advancing avenue for quantum computation, simulation and metrology.

Harnessing the two valence electron structure and metastable clock states of alkaline-earth-like atoms such as ytterbium (Yb) offers new opportunities for overcoming present limitations imposed on coherence times, array preparation, atom addressing and Rydberg-mediated entanglement. Recently developed qubit architectures, error correction schemes and the capability of mid-circuit readout motivate fault-tolerant quantum computing.

In this poster we report on our experimental approach to building an Yb Rydberg tweezer platform.

We present ongoing work towards realizing uniform tweezer arrays using a Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm, mobile traps for atom reconfiguration, global Raman beam addressing and single-photon Rydberg excitation. We show a machine learning assisted two-qubit gate design [1] utilizing a hybrid-classical optimizer to construct fidelity-optimal pulse sequences for realizing CNOT gates.

​​​​​​[1] N. Heimann et al., arXiv 2306.08691 (2023)