Equipment for Ultracold Molecular Assembly
Abstract
Technology transforms our lives. Improvements of atomic clock were crucial to the development of GPS that changes the way we navigate and communicate. Advances of laser technology propel scientific progresses and prevail in consumer products, industrial processing, and military usage. Exploiting quantum nature of matter for new technology will revolutionize our modern lives. Quantum information processors are being developed to allow computing to take place in a vastly higher-dimensional space than regular computers can access. In such a Hilbert space, solving complex optimization problems and even breaking cryptographic codes become comparatively simple computational tasks. Recently, quantum simulations from ultracold atomic Fermi gases in optical lattice are beginning to reveal underlying principles for exotic material whose properties cannot be predicted with classical computers. Extending the same quantum controls to ultracold polar molecules is an exciting new frontier. Harnessing rich molecular internal degrees of freedom and strong electric dipolar interactions can lead to many novel applications in quantum computing, quantum simulation, quantum chemistry, and precision tests of nature. For these purposes, many breakthroughs on cooling and trapping molecules have been made in the last decade. But the technology is still far from mature. In light of the huge payoff from both the fundamental and technological point of views, we outlined a new bottom-up approach to create ultracold polar molecules in a 2015 AFOSR YIP. We also put forth ÒPolar Molecules as New Qubits in an Optical Tweezer ArrayÓ in a recent proposal to ARO. In particular, we aim to produce ultracold molecules in the absolute quantum ground state, where single molecules are assembled one by one from individual atoms. The scheme involves laser cooling, optical trapping, Raman sideband cooling, single atom transport, and coherent molecular state transfer. The inherent single particle manipulation and detection capabilities will be crucial to future quantum applications and differentiate our approach from all prior work. My research group has made important progress since we first proposed this research. We demonstrated quantum motional control of constituent atoms, including 3D ground-state cooling of both single cesium atoms and single sodium atoms in optical tweezers, transporting single atoms by microns without motional excitations, and merging single atoms in and out of different optical tweezer potentials. Our demonstrations showcase the flexibility of optical tweezer based neutral atoms system while maintaining high degrees of quantum control. On the one hand, these new capabilities open exciting possibilities of gas-phase single molecule spectroscopy; on the other hand, we continue to make progress to convert one atom pair into a single molecule. With this DURIP proposal, we request funding for equipment that is necessary to scale up the number of atoms and molecules that we can have full quantum control over by scaling up the number of optical tweezers. We also request funding for a custom high quality glass cell with built-in transparent electrodes to fully realize molecular electric dipolar interactions for the applications of quantum computing and quantum simulation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 14, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1810194
Entities
People
- Kang-Kuen Ni
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Harvard University
- United States Army