Ultracold Fermions in Optical Tweezers: Tunneling, Interferometry, and Fast Collisional Gates

Optical tweezers have emerged as a powerful platform for controlling individual neutral atoms, combining microscopic spatial control, tunable interactions, and long coherence times. In this talk, I will begin with a broad overview of the field and then present our work with ultracold fermionic atoms in optical tweezers, focusing on how their motional states and quantum statistics can be used as resources for coherent control.

 

I will first discuss spatial adiabatic passage, where tunneling between neighboring tweezers enables robust and coherent atom transport, in close analogy with adiabatic passage techniques used for internal-state control. I will then describe how controlled tunneling and interactions can be used to realize fast collisional gates between fermionic atoms, offering a route toward high-fidelity two-qubit operations based on motional dynamics. I will also present our work on atomic interferometry in optical tweezers, where coherent splitting and recombination of matter waves provide a sensitive probe of motion and external forces. Finally, I will discuss recent results that expand the experimental toolbox, including the identification of a magic wavelength for the D1 transition of potassium and studies of light-assisted collisions in optical tweezers.