Verdediging van Alex Urech: Enkelvoudige strontiumatomen in optische pincetten.

This thesis shows our work towards trapping single strontium atoms inside tightly focused off-resonant laser beams, known as optical tweezers. More specifically, we demonstrate high-fidelity imaging of single strontium atoms using its narrow (7.4 kHz-wide) 1S0 - 3P1 transition. The atoms are trapped in non-magic-wavelength tweezers for this transition. We detect the photons scattered during Sisyphus cooling, thus keeping the atoms near the motional ground state of the tweezer throughout imaging. Imaging using a narrow-linewidth transition in a non-magic-wavelength tweezer also allows for selective imaging of a given tweezer. As a demonstration, we selectively image (hide) a single tweezer from the array. We continue with some theoretical calculations, including calculations that are important for the main experimental result along with a possible future quantum computation scheme based on qudits.
The thesis continues with some additional experimental details and results. This section’s primary focus is to highlight the methods that we found useful in initially acquiring single-atom results. This includes a brief overview of the experimental setup, characterization and alignment of the optical tweezer setup, additional information on our site-selective imaging technique, and our results on using an additional movable tweezer to sort the atoms into a defect-free array. Finally, in the outlook and conclusion, we mention our ongoing work towards Rydberg excitation of atoms in the array, which is a key ingredient for future quantum simulation and quantum computation experiments.