Single-Spin Addressing in an Atomic Mott Insulator

Abstract

Ultracold atoms in optical lattices are a versatile tool to investigate fundamental properties of quantum many body systems. In particular, the high degree of control of experimental parameters has allowed the study of many interesting phenomena such as quantum phase transitions and quantum spin dynamics. Here we demonstrate how such control can be extended down to the most fundamental level of a single spin at a specific site of an optical lattice. Using a tightly focussed laser beam together with a microwave field, we were able to flip the spin of individual atoms in a Mott insulator with sub-diffraction-limited resolution, well below the lattice spacing. The Mott insulator provided us with a large two-dimensional array of perfectly arranged atoms, in which we created arbitrary spin patterns by sequentially addressing selected lattice sites after freezing out the atom distribution. We directly monitored the tunnelling quantum dynamics of single atoms in the lattice prepared along a single line and observed that our addressing scheme leaves the atoms in the motional ground state. Our results open the path to a wide range of novel applications from quantum dynamics of spin impurities, entropy transport, implementation of novel cooling schemes, and engineering of quantum many-body phases to quantum information processing.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Quantum walks of correlated particles
• Quantum Walk in Position Space with Single Optically Trapped Atoms
• Repulsively bound atom pairs in an optical lattice
• Realization of quantum walks with negligible decoherence in waveguide lattices
• Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells using Atomic Clock Shifts
• Formation of spatial shell structures in the superfluid to Mott insulator transition
• Experimental demonstration of single-site addressability in a two-dimensional optical lattice
• Coherent Quantum Optical Control with Subwavelength Resolution
• Spin dynamics in a one-dimensional ferromagnetic Bose gas
• Spin-charge separation in two-component Bose-gases
• Manipulation of Single Neutral Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Addressing individual atoms in optical lattices with standing-wave driving fields

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Quantum Simulation of Antiferromagnetic Spin Chains in an Optical Lattice
• Coherent light scattering from a two-dimensional Mott insulator
• Quantum Transport of Bosonic Cold Atoms in Double Well Optical Lattices
• Initializing an unmodulated spin chain to operate as a high quality quantum data-bus
• Entanglement Enhanced Information Transfer through Strongly Correlated Systems and its Application to Optical Lattices
• Quantum Spinon Oscillations