High-resolution spectroscopy and single-photon Rydberg excitation of reconfigurable ytterbium atom tweezer arrays utilizing a metastable state

Abstract

We present an experimental system for Rydberg tweezer arrays with ytterbium (Yb) atoms featuring internal state manipulation between the ground 1 S0 and the metastable 3 P2 states, and single-photon excitation from the 3 P2 to Rydberg states. In the experiments, single Yb atoms are trapped in two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers and are detected by fluorescence imaging with the intercombination 1 S0 ↔ 3 P1 transition, and the defect-free single atom arrays are prepared by the rearrangement with the feedaback. We successfully perform high-resolution 1 S0 ↔ 3 P2 state spectroscopy for the single atoms, demonstrating the utilities of this ultranarrow transition. We further perform single-photon excitation from the 3 P2 to Rydberg states for the single atoms, which is a key for the efficient Rydberg excitation. We also perform a systematic measurement of a complex energy structure of a series of D states including newly observed 3 D3 states. The developed system shows feasibility of future experiments towards quantum simulations and computations using single Yb atoms.