Quantifying Light-assisted Collisions in Optical Tweezers Across the Hyperfine Spectrum*

An essential aspect of control within optical tweezer systems is the process of light-assisted collisions (LACs), wherein two colliding atoms absorb a photon to form a quasi-molecular state.  Despite their central role in sub-Poissonian loading of tweezers and parity imaging in quantum-gas microscopes, accurate predictions of near-resoant LAC behavior remain elusive. In this talk, I will highlight our recent work that elucidates the influence of hyperfine-resolved molecular states in resonant dipole interactions between two Rb87 atoms cotrapped in an optical tweezer, and in doing so, demonstrates a novel collision-mediated diatomic imaging technique that exploits repulsive LACs to convert 2 atoms into 1. Furthermore, I will describe a theoretical model that incorporates hypefine-resolved molecular photoassociation potentials and the Landau-Zener formalism to understand the role of molecular state density and interaction strength in shaping collisional dynamics. Our findings offer key insights for leveraging hyperfine structure in laser-induced collisions to control cold atoms and molecules in a broad range of quantum science applications, while also aiding in the prediction of new atomic and molecular species for the next generation of quantum technologies.