Optical lattices entering the realm of solid-state crystals

Optical lattices are the basic blocks of atomic quantum technology. The scale and resolution of these lattices are diffraction-limited to the light wavelength. Tight confinement of single sites in conventional lattices requires excessive laser intensity which in turn suppresses the coherence due to enhanced scattering. In this talk I propose a new scheme for atomic optical lattice with sub-wavelength spatial structure. The coherent optical control of Rydberg interaction has opened a wide range of applications in quantum technology [1-8]. This presentation utilises the nonlinear optical response of the three-level Rydberg-dressed atoms to form ultra-narrow trapping potentials [9]. This arrangement is not constrained by the diffraction limit of the driving fields. The lattice consists of a 3D array of ultra-narrow Lorentzian wells with sub-nanometer widths. The scheme allows moving adjacent sites to close distances with sub-nanometer resolution. These extreme scales are now optically accessible by a hybrid scheme deploying the dipolar interaction and optical twist of atomic eigenstates. The interaction-induced two-body resonance that forms the trapping potential [10], only occurs at a peculiar laser intensity, localizing the trap sites to ultra-narrow regions over the standing-wave driving field. The Lorentzian trapping potentials with 2A° width and 30MHz depth are realizable with scattering rates as low as 1Hz. The mentioned improvements allow quantum logic operations with Rydberg-Fermi interaction [11-12]. The new features are particularly demanding for the realization of atomtronics, quantum walks [13], Hubbard models, and neutral-atom quantum simulation.



References:

1- M. Khazali, K. Mølmer, Phys. Rev. X 10, 021054 (2020).

2- M. Khazali, Phys. Rev. A 98, 043836 (2018)

3- M. Khazali, H. W. Lau, A. Humeniuk, C. Simon, Phys. Rev. A 94, 023408 (2016)

4- M. Khazali, K. Heshami, C. Simon, Phys. Rev. A 91, 030301 (2015)

5- M. Khazali, C. Murry, T. Pohl, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 113605 (2019)

6- M. Khazali, K. Heshami, C. Simon J. Phys. B, 50, 21 (2017)

7- M. Khazali, IJAP 10, 19 (2021)

8- Khazali, Mohammadsadegh. "Applications of Atomic Ensembles for Photonic Quantum Information Processing and Fundamental Tests of Quantum Physics." Ph.D. thesis, University of Calgary (2016).

9- Khazali, M. (2023). Subnanometer confinement and bundling of atoms in a Rydberg empowered optical lattice. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.04450.

10- M Khazali, Phys. Rev. Research 3, L032033 (2021)

11- Khazali, M., & Lechner, W. (2021). Electron cloud design for Rydberg multi-qubit gates. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.01581.

12- Khazali, M. (2022). Photonic interface for long-distance entanglement of logical-qubits. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.08522.

13- M. Khazali, Quantum 6, 664 (2022).