About the Kaufman Group

One of the scientific pursuits for which alkaline-earth atoms are most famous is optical atomic clocks. In atoms like Strontium and Ytterbium, there exists a long-lived optical transition known as the “clock transition”. Viewed as an oscillator, this transition has an intrinsic quality factor of in excess of 10¹⁷— that is, it can ring quadrillions of times before the oscillations die out. This means this oscillator can serve as an exceptional time-keeper, and, indeed, in the past decade, such optical atomic clocks have allowed some of the most precise measurements ever made by humans.

Another appealing aspect of alkaline-earth atoms is the presence of a second relatively narrow transition — though not as narrow as the clock transition — that can be used for ground-state laser cooling. This is especially powerful when combined with the possibility of rearranging optical tweezers to prepare arbitrary atomic distributions with very low entropy in the atomic spatial distribution. So far, large-scale demonstrations of atomic rearrangement have been used for spin models, with atoms that might be relatively hot in their motional degrees of freedom. In this project, we seek to prepare arbitrary distributions of scalable arrays of ground-state atoms for large scale itinerant models.

Starting with our demonstration of optical-tweezer trapping of Ytterbium-171, we have been exploring how this novel atom can be used for quantum computing, as well as for other directions in quantum simulation and metrology. The atom has a nuclear-spin of 1/2, which serves as a robust space for storing quantum information. At the same time, the presence of an optical clock transition and metastable enables key physical gadgets for mid-circuit measurement, two-qubit gates, and quantum error correction.