Cavity-Enhanced Optical Lattices for Scaling Neutral Atom Quantum Technologies to Higher Qubit Numbers
A. J. Park, Jan Trautmann, Neven Šantić, V. Klüsener, A. Heinz, Immanuel Bloch, Sebastian Blatt
Abstract
We demonstrate a cavity-based solution to scale up experiments with ultracold atoms in optical lattices by an order of magnitude over state-of-the-art free-space lattices. Our two-dimensional (2D) optical lattices are created by power-enhancement cavities with large mode waists of 489(8) m and allow us to trap ultracold strontium atoms at a lattice depth of 60 K by using only 80 mW of input light per cavity axis. We characterize these lattices using high-resolution clock spectroscopy and resolve carrier transitions between different vibrational levels. With these spectral features, we locally measure the lattice potential envelope and the sample temperature with a spatial resolution limited only by the optical resolution of the imaging system. The measured ground-band and trap lifetimes are 18(3) s and 59(2) s, respectively, and the lattice frequency (depth) is long-term stable on the megahertz (0.1%) level. Our results show that large, deep, and stable 2D cavity-enhanced lattices can be created at any wavelength and can significantly increase the qubit number for neutral-atom-based quantum simulators, quantum computers, sensors, and optical-lattice clocks.