Erasure-cooling, control, and hyper-entanglement of motion in optical tweezers

Understand

Coherently controlling the motion of single atoms in optical tweezers would enable new applications in quantum information science.

• To demonstrate this, we first prepare atoms in their motional ground state using a species-agnostic cooling mechanism that converts motional excitations into erasures -- errors with a known location.
• This cooling mechanism fundamentally outperforms idealized traditional sideband cooling, which we experimentally demonstrate.
• By coherently manipulating the resultant pure motional state, we perform mid-circuit readout and mid-circuit erasure detection via local shelving into motional superposition states.