MIT and Harvard show global fields can unlock richer control of neutral atoms

[Apogee Evan]

Controlling every atom individually is hard, but a new result suggests it may not always be necessary. Quantum Zeitgeist reports on work from MIT and Harvard, reported as forthcoming in Nature Physics, showing that pulses applied to an entire array of atoms can produce interactions the hardware does not naturally have

Using global pulses on a Rydberg atom array, the team created an effective three atom interaction known as ZXZ coupling, which goes beyond the native two atom interactions of the system

The researchers found that universal control with global fields requires breaking mirror symmetry in a one dimensional chain. The experiment ran outside the usual Rydberg blockade regime, and on an eight atom chain, signals and correlations at the ends of the chain were consistent with topological edge modes. Hong-Ye Hu is named as a theory lead

The team said global fields can support far richer quantum dynamics than the hardware's built in interactions alone would suggest. The system was small, the scaling results come from numerical simulation, and the paper had not yet been published at the time of the report

Global control is much simpler than addressing each atom with its own laser, so this could make analogue quantum simulators easier to build and scale. Creating three body interactions opens up new physics to explore. It is an elegant result even if the system is still small

Is global control the future for quantum simulators? And how soon could this scale beyond eight atoms?

MIT-Harvard Team Finds A Way To Control Qubits With Global Fieldsquantumzeitgeist.com