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Extended Rydberg Lifetimes in a Cryogenic Atom Array

Junlan Jin1,2,*, Yue Shi1,*, Youssef Aziz Alaoui1,†, Jingxin Deng1, Yukai Lu1, Jeff D. Thompson2, and Waseem S. Bakr1,‡

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Present address: Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Collège de France, CNRS, ENS-PSL University, Sorbonne Université, 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, 75005 Paris, France.
  • ‡Contact author: wbakr@princeton.edu
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PRX Quantum 7, 033009 – Published 7 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/96bx-rjwz

Abstract

We report on the realization of a Cs133 optical tweezer array in a cryogenic blackbody radiation (BBR) environment. By enclosing the array within a 4 K radiation shield, we measure long Rydberg lifetimes, up to 406(36)  μs for the 55P3/2 Rydberg state, a factor of 3.3(3) longer than the room-temperature value. We employ single-photon coupling for coherent manipulation of the ground-Rydberg qubit. We measure a small differential dynamic polarizability of the transition, beneficial for reducing dephasing due to light intensity fluctuations. Our results pave the path for advancing neutral-atom two-qubit gate fidelities as their error budgets become increasingly dominated by T1 relaxation of the ground-Rydberg qubit.

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Popular Summary

Neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezer arrays are a leading platform for quantum computing. As in other quantum computing architectures, improving two-qubit gates is the main lever for making fault-tolerant systems practical. While recent advances have greatly improved gate performance, the finite lifetime of the highly excited Rydberg states used to implement them has emerged as the dominant remaining source of error. Here, we realize an atom array in a cryogenic environment and demonstrate a significant extension of Rydberg-state lifetimes beyond those achieved in state-of-the-art experiments. This improvement comes from suppressing transitions driven by ambient thermal radiation. These processes otherwise shorten Rydberg-state lifetimes under typical conditions. These results provide a promising path toward higher-fidelity Rydberg gates and, ultimately, large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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Outline

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PRX Quantum 7, 033009– Published 7 July, 2026
  • Received 9 February 2026
  • Revised 23 March 2026
  • Accepted 17 June 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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