Cooling a Single Atom in an Optical Tweezer to Its Quantum Ground State

By A. Kaufman, B. Lester, C. Regal. 2012

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report cooling of a single neutral atom to its three-dimensional vibrational ground state in an optical tweezer. After employing Raman sideband cooling for tens of milliseconds, we measure via sideband spectroscopy a three-dimensional ground-state occupation of ~90%. We further observe coherent control of the spin and motional state of the trapped atom. Our demonstration shows that an optical tweezer, formed simply by a tightly focused beam of light, creates sufficient confinement for efficient sideband cooling. This source of ground-state neutral atoms will be instrumental in numerous quantum simulation and logic applications that require a versatile platform for storing and manipulating ultracold single neutral atoms. For example, these results will improve current optical tweezer experiments studying atom-photon coupling and Rydberg quantum logic gates, and could provide new opportunities such as rapid production of single dipolar molecules or quantum simulation in tweezer arrays.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4ac661ead404b64a012e23f83dd2b1ee820162c

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum Thermodynamics: A Dynamical Viewpoint (2013, background): “Amazingly, in all these examples, a thermodynamic description is appropriate up to the level of a single open quantum system [8,35,62,82].”
Microscopic Control and Detection of Ultracold Strontium in Optical-Tweezer Arrays (2018, background): “Such high-fidelity laser cooling has been demonstrated in optically-trapped alkalis [23, 24, 49, 50] using two-photon Raman transitions and optical pumping.”
Quantum simulation and computing with Rydberg-interacting qubits (2020, background): “Motional dephasing could also be suppressed using dynamical decoupling sequences 135 or by cooling the atoms close to their motional ground state 86,136–139 .”
Single-Atom Trapping in Holographic 2D Arrays of Microtraps with Arbitrary Geometries (2014, background): “In combination with the recently demonstrated Raman sideband cooling of single atoms trapped in optical tweezers [42, 43], a similar system with smaller distances between microtraps —which could be achieved using highnumerical apertures objectives such as the ones used in quantum gas microscopes [44”
An atom-by-atom assembler of defect-free arbitrary two-dimensional atomic arrays (2016, background): “These results, possibly combined with Raman sideband cooling of atoms in optical microtraps [28, 29], open promising paths to study many-body physics and constitute an important resource for quantum information processing with”
Analysis of imperfections in the coherent optical excitation of single atoms to Rydberg states (2018, background): “, by using three-photon excitation [43] or reducing the temperature by Raman cooling [44,45], the above results seem to indicate that one should use high Rabi frequencies.”
Alkaline-Earth Atoms in Optical Tweezers (2018, background): “, sideband cooling close to the motional ground state in tweezers [16,17], which has enabled experiments based on coherent collisions [7] and trapping in the vicinity of nanophotonic structures [10].”
A quantum processor based on coherent transport of entangled atom arrays (2021, unknown): “Two-qubit gate fidelity can be improved using higher Rydberg laser power or more efficient delivery methods, as well as more advanced atom cooling [43].”