Entanglement of two individual neutral atoms using Rydberg blockade

Tatjana Wilk (1) , Alpha Gaëtan (1) , Charles Evellin (1) , Janik Wolters (1) , Yevhen Miroshnychenko (1) , Philippe Grangier (1) , Antoine Browaeys (1)

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Optique quantique

We report the generation of entanglement between two individual $^{87}$Rb atoms in hyperfine ground states $|F=1,M=1>$ and $|F=2,M=2>$ which are held in two optical tweezers separated by 4 $\mu$m. Our scheme relies on the Rydberg blockade effect which prevents the simultaneous excitation of the two atoms to a Rydberg state. The entangled state is generated in about 200 ns using pulsed two-photon excitation. We quantify the entanglement by applying global Raman rotations on both atoms. We measure that 61% of the initial pairs of atoms are still present at the end of the entangling sequence. These pairs are in the target entangled state with a fidelity of 0.75.

Domaines: Physique Quantique [quant-ph]

Tatjana Wilk, Alpha Gaëtan, Charles Evellin, Janik Wolters, Yevhen Miroshnychenko, et al.. Entanglement of two individual neutral atoms using Rydberg blockade. Physical Review Letters, 2010, 104, pp.010502. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.010502⟩. ⟨hal-00508934⟩