Programmable optical clocks for quantum-enhanced sensing

Optical atomic clocks based on transitions in atoms and ions continue to be at the frontier of time and frequency metrology. The precision of such a clock depends on the number of atoms that can be interrogated in parallel, as well as the relative coherence time of the atoms with the oscillator that is being stabilized to the atoms. When using many atoms, multi-particle entanglement can also be used to improve the precision of the clock. I will describe our work in this area, using an array of strontium atoms that are controlled with single-particle resolution via a tweezer array and entangled using Rydberg interactions. I will describe one experiment where we demonstrate a new multi-qubit gate protocol to create so-called “cascaded GHZ states” for enhanced sensing with a large dynamic range, as well as recent experiments using more sophisticated circuits.