Single-spin addressing in an atomic Mott insulator

By C. Weitenberg, M. Endres, Jacob Friis Sherson, M. Cheneau, P. Schauss, Takeshi Fukuhara, I. Bloch, S. Kuhr. Nature, 2011

594 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a versatile tool with which to investigate fundamental properties of quantum many-body systems. In particular, the high degree of control of experimental parameters has allowed the study of many interesting phenomena, such as quantum phase transitions and quantum spin dynamics. Here we demonstrate how such control can be implemented at the most fundamental level of a single spin at a specific site of an optical lattice. Using a tightly focused laser beam together with a microwave field, we were able to flip the spin of individual atoms in a Mott insulator with sub-diffraction-limited resolution, well below the lattice spacing. The Mott insulator provided us with a large two-dimensional array of perfectly arranged atoms, in which we created arbitrary spin patterns by sequentially addressing selected lattice sites after freezing out the atom distribution. We directly monitored the tunnelling quantum dynamics of single atoms in the lattice prepared along a single line, and observed that our addressing scheme leaves the atoms in the motional ground state. The results should enable studies of entropy transport and the quantum dynamics of spin impurities, the implementation of novel cooling schemes, and the engineering of quantum many-body phases and various quantum information processing applications.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce06e85d00feae3b8902e4cbcb110832995b722f

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Citations in the corpus

Engineered Open Systems and Quantum Simulations with Atoms and Ions (2012, methodology): “, 2010b) and manipulation of individual spins in this setup (Weitenberg et al., 2011) (see Fig.”
Experimental investigations of dipole–dipole interactions between a few Rydberg atoms (2016, methodology): “Single-atom addressing, using techniques developed in the context of 3D optical lattices [64, 65], can also be achieved in these settings [66].”
Topological quantum matter with ultracold gases in optical lattices (2016, background): “Driving controlled transitions between internal states can be exploited to manipulate single atoms [15, 16, 31], but also, to generate artificial gauge potentials [32–35] and so-called synthetic dimensions [36], as will be explained below (see [12, 13] for detailed discussions).”
Comparing and contrasting nuclei and cold atomic gases (2013, background): “Furthermore, it is now possible to address single lattice sites in an optical lattice and produce and probe only a few atoms on such a site (Bakr et al. 2010, Sherson et al. 2010, Weitenberg et al. 2011).”
Cooling a Single Atom in an Optical Tweezer to Its Quantum Ground State (2012, background): “Approaches have included dramatic demonstrations of the Mott insulator transition of an evaporatively cooled gas [7, 8], and exploration of laser cooling collections of atoms in a lattice [9–17].”
Quantum computing with atomic qubits and Rydberg interactions: progress and challenges (2016, background): “transition at the expense of longer experimental cycle times [57].”
Microscopic Control and Detection of Ultracold Strontium in Optical-Tweezer Arrays (2018, unknown): “[11] Christof Weitenberg, Manuel Endres, Jacob F.”
Coherent many-body spin dynamics in a long-range interacting Ising chain (2017, methodology): “Our experiments started with the preparation of an atomic chain of ten sites with 87(3)% filling from a Mott insulator using single-site addressing techniques [23,31,32].”
Time-Dependent Impurity in Ultracold Fermions: Orthogonality Catastrophe and Beyond (2012, unknown): “[97] Christof Weitenberg, Manuel Endres, Jacob F.”