The most striking result of this first period is the successful realization of a 51-atom qubit programmable quantum simulator with highly controlled neutral atoms. The basic principle is to create an array of 100 optical tweezers from the same AOD, which are then stochastically loaded with single atoms and rearranged to the desired configuration, before turning on Rydberg interactions. With this platform, we were able to explore the phase diagram of an Ising Hamiltonian by sweeping into various ordered phases, we could quantitatively study the associated phase transitions, we showed the preparation with high fidelity of the many-body ground state of a Rydberg crystal phase with up to 51 atoms (where classical simulations are no longer tractable) and we observed some intriguing many-body dynamics in the form of robust oscillations between complementary ordered states. We have also explored the critical dynamics accros quantum phase transitions by looking at the density of defects as a function of the frequency sweeping rate. In a second experiment, we have demonstrated the possibility to couple more than one atom to the evanescent field of a nanophotonic cavity, as a promising resource for quantum sensing and quantum networks. In a third experiment, we have observed strong coupling between a chain of atoms and a fiber-based cavity, and studied how the atomic qubits are protected from decoherence coming from inhomogeneities by strong coupling to the optical cavity.
Publications related to this project:
A. Keesling, A. Omran, H. Levine, H. Bernien, H. Pichler, S. Choi, R. Samajdar, S. Schwartz, P. Silvi, S. Sachdev, P. Zoller, M. Endres, M. Greiner, V. Vuletic and M. D. Lukin. Probing quantum critical dynamics on a programmable Rydberg simulator. arXiv:1809.05540 accepted for publication in Nature (April 2019).
H. Levine, A. Keesling, A. Omran, H. Bernien, S. Schwartz, A. S. Zibrov, M. Endres, M. Greiner, V. Vuletic and M. D. Lukin. High-fidelity control and entanglement of Rydberg atom qubits. Physical Review Letters 121, 123603 (2018).
H. Bernien, S. Schwartz, A. Keesling, H. Levine, A. Omran, H. Pichler, S. Choi, A. S. Zibrov, M. Endres, M. Greiner, V. Vuletic and M. D. Lukin, Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator, Nature 551, 579-584 (2017).
Link to the report in brief on the CORDIS website:
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/195575/brief/en