Optical tweezer manipulation for atom tetris

Abstract

Atoms can be individually captured and guided by light through optical dipole-trapping. However, applying this to many atoms simultaneously has been difficult due to the low inertia of atoms. Recently dynamically-controlled laser beams achieved such demonstrations, enabling a bottom-up approach to form arbitrary atom lattices, deterministic atom loading, atom-sorting, and even single-atom-level machinery. Here we report the latest improvements of the single-atom-level dynamic holographic optical tweezers. With the hardware and software upgrades to be explained in the text, the overall performance has improved to form arbitrary 2D lattices of a size about N=20, with success probability exceeding 50%.