Jacob Covey is the Richard Chace Tolman postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, working in the group of Manuel Endres on single-atom control in arrays of alkalineearth atoms. He has demonstrated that this platform is simultaneously compatible with atomic clocks and entanglement generation via highly-excited Rydberg states, opening the door to quantum-enhanced metrology as well as novel directions in quantum computing and simulation. He completed his PhD at JILA/NIST and the University of Colorado-Boulder in the groups of Jun Ye and the late Deborah Jin, where he worked on ultracold polar molecules in optical lattices as an emerging platform for quantum computing and simulation.

Quantum entanglement is the central resource in quantum information science applications including metrology, computation, and communication. A defect-free array of isolated, neutral particles with long-range, state-dependent interactions is an attractive architecture for scalable entanglement generation. In this talk, I will describe two platforms that offer long-range interactions: polar molecules, and atoms in highly-excited Rydberg states. I will focus on alkalineearth atoms (AEAs), which also possess ultra-narrow ‘clock’ transitions for precision metrology. I will describe the techniques we pioneered for cooling and imaging single AEAsin optical tweezer arrays for the first time [1,2], as well as a new platform for metrology based on single-atom readout in an atomic array clock [3]. Further, I will discuss recent observations of high-fidelity control, detection, and entanglement using Rydberg states [4]. I will close with an outlook of future research directions.

[1] A. Cooper, JPC, et al., “Alkaline-Earth Atoms in Optical Tweezers”, Phys. Rev. X 8, 041055 (2018). [2] JPC, et al., “2000-Times Repeated Imaging of Strontium Atoms in Clock-Magic Tweezer Arrays”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 173201 (2019). [3] I. S. Madjarov, …, JPC, et al., “An Atomic-Array Optical Clock with Single-Atom Readout”, Phys. Rev. X 9, 041052 (2019). [4] I. S. Madjarov*, JPC*, et al., “High-Fidelity Control, Detection, and Entanglement of AlkalineEarth Rydberg Atoms”, arXiv:2001.04455 (2020).