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

We demonstrate how motional degrees of freedom in optical tweezers can be used as quantum information carriers. To this end, we first implement a species-agnostic cooling mechanism via conversion of motional excitations into erasures - errors with a known location - reminiscent of Maxwell's demon thought experiment. We find that this cooling mechanism fundamentally outperforms idealized traditional sideband cooling, which we experimentally demonstrate in specific scenarios. By coherently manipulating the motional state, we perform mid-circuit readout and mid-circuit erasure detection of an optical qubit via local shelving into motional superposition states. We finally entangle the motion of two atoms in separate tweezers, and utilize this to generate hyper-entanglement by preparing a simultaneous Bell state of motional and optical qubits. This work shows how controlling motion enriches the toolbox of quantum information processing with neutral atoms, and opens unique prospects for metrology enhanced by mid-circuit readout and a large class of quantum operations enabled via hyper-entanglement.Comment: PS, ALS and RF contributed equally to this wor

Erasure conversion in a high-fidelity Rydberg quantum simulator

Minimizing and understanding errors is critical for quantum science, both in noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices and for the quest towards fault-tolerant quantum computation. Rydberg arrays have emerged as a prominent platform in this context with impressive system sizes and proposals suggesting how error-correction thresholds could be significantly improved by detecting leakage errors with single-atom resolution, a form of erasure error conversion. However, two-qubit entanglement fidelities in Rydberg atom arrays have lagged behind competitors and this type of erasure conversion is yet to be realized for matter-based qubits in general. Here we demonstrate both erasure conversion and high-fidelity Bell state generation using a Rydberg quantum simulator. We implement erasure conversion via fast imaging of alkaline-earth atoms, which leaves atoms in a metastable state unperturbed and yields additional information independent of the final qubit readout. When excising data with observed erasure errors, we achieve a lower-bound for the Bell state generation fidelity of ${\geq} 0.9971^{+10}_{-13}$, which improves to ${\geq}0.9985^{+7}_{-12}$ when correcting for remaining state preparation errors. We further demonstrate erasure conversion in a quantum simulation experiment for quasi-adiabatic preparation of long-range order across a quantum phase transition, where we explicitly differentiate erasure conversion of preparation and Rydberg decay errors. We unveil the otherwise hidden impact of these errors on the simulation outcome by evaluating correlations between erasures and the final readout as well as between erasures themselves. Our work demonstrates the capability for Rydberg-based entanglement to reach fidelities in the ${\sim} 0.999$ regime, with higher fidelities a question of technical improvements, and shows how erasure conversion can be utilized in NISQ devices.Comment: PS and ALS contributed equally to this wor

Multi-ensemble metrology by programming local rotations with atom movements

Current optical atomic clocks do not utilize their resources optimally. In particular, an exponential gain could be achieved if multiple atomic ensembles were to be controlled or read-out individually, even without entanglement. However, controlling optical transitions locally remains an outstanding challenge for neutral atom based clocks and quantum computing platforms. Here we show arbitrary, single-site addressing for an optical transition via sub-wavelength controlled moves of tweezer-trapped atoms, which we perform with $99.84(5)\%$ fidelity and with $0.1(2)\%$ crosstalk to non-addressed atoms. The scheme is highly robust as it relies only on relative position changes of tweezers and requires no additional addressing beams. Using this technique, we implement single-shot, dual-quadrature readout of Ramsey interferometry using two atomic ensembles simultaneously, and show an enhancement of the usable interrogation time at a given phase-slip error probability, yielding a 2.55(9) dB gain over standard, single-ensemble methods. Finally, we program a sequence which performs local dynamical decoupling during Ramsey evolution to evolve three ensembles with variable phase sensitivities, a key ingredient of optimal clock interrogation. Our results demonstrate the potential of fully programmable quantum optical clocks even without entanglement and could be combined with metrologically useful entangled states in the future

Benchmarking highly entangled states on a 60-atom analog quantum simulator

Quantum systems have entered a competitive regime where classical computers must make approximations to represent highly entangled quantum states. However, in this beyond-classically-exact regime, fidelity comparisons between quantum and classical systems have so far been limited to digital quantum devices, and it remains unsolved how to estimate the actual entanglement content of experiments. Here we perform fidelity benchmarking and mixed-state entanglement estimation with a 60-atom analog Rydberg quantum simulator, reaching a high entanglement entropy regime where exact classical simulation becomes impractical. Our benchmarking protocol involves extrapolation from comparisons against many approximate classical algorithms with varying entanglement limits. We then develop and demonstrate an estimator of the experimental mixed-state entanglement, finding our experiment is competitive with state-of-the-art digital quantum devices performing random circuit evolution. Finally, we compare the experimental fidelity against that achieved by various approximate classical algorithms, and find that only one, which we introduce here, is able to keep pace with the experiment on the classical hardware we employ. Our results enable a new paradigm for evaluating the performance of both analog and digital quantum devices in the beyond-classically-exact regime, and highlight the evolving divide between quantum and classical systems.Comment: ALS, ZC, and JC contributed equall

HRS1 Acts as a Negative Regulator of Abscisic Acid Signaling to Promote Timely Germination of Arabidopsis Seeds

In this work, we conducted functional analysis of Arabidopsis HRS1 gene in order to provide new insights into the mechanisms governing seed germination. Compared with wild type (WT) control, HRS1 knockout mutant (hrs1-1) exhibited significant germination delays on either normal medium or those supplemented with abscisic acid (ABA) or sodium chloride (NaCl), with the magnitude of the delay being substantially larger on the latter media. The hypersensitivity of hrs1-1 germination to ABA and NaCl required ABI3, ABI4 and ABI5, and was aggravated in the double mutant hrs1-1abi1-2 and triple mutant hrs1-1hab1-1abi1-2, indicating that HRS1 acts as a negative regulator of ABA signaling during seed germination. Consistent with this notion, HRS1 expression was found in the embryo axis, and was regulated both temporally and spatially, during seed germination. Further analysis showed that the delay of hrs1-1 germination under normal conditions was associated with reduction in the elongation of the cells located in the lower hypocotyl (LH) and transition zone (TZ) of embryo axis. Interestingly, the germination rate of hrs1-1 was more severely reduced by the inhibitor of cell elongation, and more significantly decreased by the suppressors of plasmalemma H+-ATPase activity, than that of WT control. The plasmalemma H+-ATPase activity in the germinating seeds of hrs1-1 was substantially lower than that exhibited by WT control, and fusicoccin, an activator of this pump, corrected the transient germination delay of hrs1-1. Together, our data suggest that HRS1 may be needed for suppressing ABA signaling in germinating embryo axis, which promotes the timely germination of Arabidopsis seeds probably by facilitating the proper function of plasmalemma H+-ATPase and the efficient elongation of LH and TZ cells