• Accepted Paper

Fast single-atom preparation in optical tweezers via Rydberg blockade

Yiyi Li, Vernon M. Hughes, Michael Peper, Yicheng Bao, Chenyuan Li, Sanzhar Bissenali, and Jeff D. Thompson

PRX Quantum - Accepted 21 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8t3p-x6s7

Abstract

Continuously replenished optical tweezer arrays will unlock unlimited-depth quantum circuits with neutral atom qubits. A key bottleneck limiting the cycle time of these systems is removing atoms from tweezers initially loaded with more than one atom. In the conventional technique of light-assisted collisions, slow collisional dynamics limit the timescale for removing excess atoms to several milliseconds. Here, we propose and demonstrate a scheme for selectively removing one atom at a time from multiply occupied tweezers on a microsecond timescale, using intra-tweezer Rydberg blockade and autoionization. We demonstrate the protocol in 171Yb in two complementary regimes. With two-photon Rydberg excitation from the ground state, we reduce the multi-atom probability to 1% in 64.8 µs, while retaining single atoms in 58.2(2)% of the tweezers, which is comparable to the filling fraction achieved with light-assisted collisions under the same experimental conditions, but over two orders of magnitude faster. With single-photon excitation from the metastable state 3P0, reduced single-atom loss enables a higher filling fraction of 74.8(3)%, at the cost of additional temporal overhead to prepare the atoms in 3P0. The final filling fraction is limited by an unexplained two-body loss mechanism, which, if solved, could enable fast, quasi-deterministic loading.

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