Preparation of hundreds of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezer arrays

Abstract

We present programmable two-dimensional arrays of microscopic atomic ensembles consisting of more than 400 sites with nearly uniform filling and small atom number fluctuations. Our approach involves direct projection of light patterns from a digital micromirror device with high spatial resolution onto an optical pancake trap acting as a reservoir. This makes it possible to load large arrays of tweezers in a single step with high occupation numbers and low power requirements per tweezer. Each atomic ensemble is confined to ~1 μm3 with a controllable occupation from 20 to 200 atoms and with (sub)-Poissonian atom number fluctuations. Thus, they are ideally suited for quantum simulation and for realizing large arrays of collectively encoded Rydberg-atom qubits for quantum information processing.