A quantum gas microscope for detecting single atoms in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice

By W. Bakr, J. Gillen, A. Peng, S. Fölling, M. Greiner. Nature, 2009

1,245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent years have seen tremendous progress in creating complex atomic many-body quantum systems. One approach is to use macroscopic, effectively thermodynamic ensembles of ultracold atoms to create quantum gases and strongly correlated states of matter, and to analyse the bulk properties of the ensemble. For example, bosonic and fermionic atoms in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice can be used for quantum simulations of solid-state models. The opposite approach is to build up microscopic quantum systems atom-by-atom, with complete control over all degrees of freedom. The atoms or ions act as qubits and allow the realization of quantum gates, with the goal of creating highly controllable quantum information systems. Until now, the macroscopic and microscopic strategies have been fairly disconnected. Here we present a quantum gas ‘microscope’ that bridges the two approaches, realizing a system in which atoms of a macroscopic ensemble are detected individually and a complete set of degrees of freedom for each of them is determined through preparation and measurement. By implementing a high-resolution optical imaging system, single atoms are detected with near-unity fidelity on individual sites of a Hubbard-regime optical lattice. The lattice itself is generated by projecting a holographic mask through the imaging system. It has an arbitrary geometry, chosen to support both strong tunnel coupling between lattice sites and strong on-site confinement. Our approach can be used to directly detect strongly correlated states of matter; in the context of condensed matter simulation, this corresponds to the detection of individual electrons in the simulated crystal. Also, the quantum gas microscope may enable addressing and read-out of large-scale quantum information systems based on ultracold atoms.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e42039864c4ecfcd3d687571a60cb6ac5b41dbfa

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Citations in the corpus

Microscopic Control and Detection of Ultracold Strontium in Optical-Tweezer Arrays (2018, background): “With high-resolution optics, single atoms bound in micronscale arrays may be resolved through fluorescence detection [5, 6], enabling parallel qubit readout and new perspectives on many-body quantum systems [7–10].”
Exponential Improvement in Photon Storage Fidelities Using Subradiance and “Selective Radiance” in Atomic Arrays (2017, background): “Standard free-space optical lattices [104] can achieve lattice constants of d ∼ λ0=2, and quantum gas microscopes [105] are able to generate single 2D arrays.”
Quantum trajectories and open many-body quantum systems (2014, background): “Local single-particle losses can be generated in experiments either by collisions with a background gas [80], or deliberately using individual addressing with an electron beam [314] or with light in quantum gas microscopes [315] that have single-site resolution in an optical lattice [316, 317].”
Roadmap on structured light (2016, background): “As shown in figure 18, one can, for example, envision a modification of the recently developed quantum gas microscope [126] involving structured light input fields.”
Time-Dependent Impurity in Ultracold Fermions: Orthogonality Catastrophe and Beyond (2012, background): “Furthermore, quantum-gas microscopes [90,91] allow in situmeasurements of energy deposited into 1D and 2D many-body systems following nonequilibrium |S (t )|”
Classical and Quantum Shortcuts to Adiabaticity for Scale-Invariant Driving (2014, positive): “Spatially zooming up the quantum state in these systems constitutes an interesting complementary alternative to other imaging techniques based on long expansion times [70] and large numerical aperture optics [92, 93].”
Quantum simulation of the Hubbard model with ultracold fermions in optical lattices (2018, positive): “Pioneered for bosonic atoms in 2009 [128,129], this technique has become available for fermionic atoms only in 2015 [130–134].”