Optimal Control and Erasure Detection for Many-Body state preparation in Ytterbium-171 Atom Arrays*

We report our progress in producing many-body states in an array of neutral ytterbium atoms, an atom with promising properties for quantum information process and high fidelity many-body physics. We arrange the atoms in a ladder geometry, prepare them in their metastable clock state, and drive them to Rydberg states with a single photon transition. We target a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, the long-range entangled ground state of the implemented Hamiltonian. 

We implement Rydberg detection via autoionization for high fidelity state detection and use erasure conversion to mitigate state preparation errors and detect Rydberg decay errors. With these tools in hand, we apply optimal control techniques to design pulses that optimize the many-body-statet preparation while mitigating the effects of spatial array disorder and Rydberg decay. Fast rotations of the nuclear qubit of Yb-171 with an optical Raman transition will allow us to translate the many-body state into the long-lived hyperfine manifold [1], opening up applications of GHZ states in quantum metrology and for fast state preparation in quantum error correction codes.