Physics Colloquium: “Metrology with Optical Tweezer Arrays of Neutral Atoms”

Adam Kaufman

University of Colorado @ Boulder, JILA

Abstract: Quantum science with neutral atoms has seen great advances in the past two decades. Many of these advances follow from the development of new techniques for cooling, trapping, and controlling atomic samples. As one example, the technique of optical tweezer trapping of neutral atom arrays has been a powerful tool for quantum simulation and quantum information, because it enables control and detection of individual atoms with switchable interactions. In this talk, I will describe ongoing work at JILA where we have explored a new direction for the optical tweezer platform: metrology. I will report our recent progress towards combining scalability and quantum coherence in a tweezer-based optical atomic clock platform, and our efforts towards using quantum information concepts and many-body dynamics to create entangled states that enhance metrological performance. Much of this technology is based in the use of tweezer-trapping of a new family of atoms, alkaline-earth atoms — I will discuss the broader outlook of this direction and new pursuits on the horizon.

All lectures are via Zoom: https://mines.zoom.us/j/98686472990?pwd=REFBbFBJZk9MbXhldGRzemNaczlTZz09

Bio: Dr. Adam Kaufman is an associate JILA fellow and assistant professor adjoint at CU Boulder. He did his PhD at JILA, studying few-body quantum mechanics of atoms in optical tweezers. Afterwards, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, he investigated the dynamics of entanglement in thermalizing many-body systems and other Bose-Hubbard phenomena. In 2017, he moved back to JILA where he has continued working in the field of quantum science with neutral atoms. He is a winner of the prestigious APS DAMOP thesis prize in 2016, and he pioneered the research on atomic clocks based on optical tweezers.