DAMOP 2019 retrospective: Tweezers are IN

Last week we went to Milwaukee for the annual big AMO physics conference: DAMOP 2019. Like every year I go, I’ve come back star-struck at the amazing work other groups are doing. At some times it seems like only Boulder, Munich, and CUA (MIT/Harvard) really matter because the results flying out of the groups there never fail to impress.

The hot new things this year, at least in my eyes, are definitely quantum gas microscopes (which I gave a journal club on) and optical tweezer arrays. I knew optical tweezer arrays were cool back from the 2016 paper out of the Lukin group [arXiv:1607.03044 | Science] where they arranged single atoms in tweezers into arbitrary 1D patterns. Then came their now infamous (?) “51 atom quantum simulator” paper [arXiv:1707.04344 | Nature] looking at effects from interactions generated using a Rydberg state.

There were also other groups doing really cool work during this time, including the Browaeys group who produced a lot of cool physics results… and an Eiffel Tower of atoms!!!

drawing source: Barredo … Browaeys, Nature (2018) [arXiv:1712.02727 | Nature]

But we didn’t go to DAMOP last year, and I feel like I didn’t fully understand just how big tweezers were getting. Even though I saw huge results on the arXiv like Browaeys’ work with Rydberg-Rydberg SSH [arXiv:1810.13286] and Kang-Kuen Ni and John Doyle’s work with molecules in tweezers [arXiv:1902.03935, arXiv:1902.00497], seeing all of the tweezer talks in one place got me truly excited. In particular, the highlight of the conference was Ahmed Omran’s talk on Friday morning about the paper he dropped only two weeks before: [arXiv:1905.05721].

I missed the last few tweezers papers out of the Lukin group, in particular their work showing Rydberg-Rydberg entanglement between atoms in tweezers [arXiv:1806.04682]… so it was a huge shock to me seeing Ahmed up there talking about making entangled states of 20 atoms!!! He also showed de-entangling some of the middle atoms to form two entangled atoms separated by many tweezer sites.

Also, a fraction of his talk was a straight upgrade to one of the studies we have been performing on counter-diabatic driving. While we calculated and then followed a good trajectory, the madmen over at CUA are doing it on the fly, sending over their real-time data to a server in a different country to get trajectory info in milliseconds (?). It’s so impressive.

Tweezers are moving so fast and the results flying out are so impressive that it’s hard just to keep track of what’s going on. It feels like after a couple more years, we’re going to be in quantum computing territory. Or we already are, and I need DAMOP 2020 to shock me into realizing it.