Qubit fidelity of a single atom transferred among the sites of a ring optical lattice

Abstract

We demonstrate the transfer of a single atom in a ring optical lattice with the aid of an auxiliary moving tweezer and investigate the influences on fidelity of the qubit encoded in the atom. When the tweezer has deeper trap depth and moves across the lattice, it is observed that an atom in one site follows the movement. The transfer efficiency of one atom to the destination site reaches up to 95%. This scheme is suitable for scalable quantum registers because of no influence on the other sites. We obtain atomic qubit fidelity during the transfer process by using quantum state tomography. Extracted fidelity indicates that the eigenstate is well preserved, while the superposition state is influenced. In combination with spin-echo measurement, dephasing mechanisms in this process are analyzed and discussed in detail. Loss of qubit fidelity is found to result from heating effects induced by this process and pointing instabilities of the trap laser. Our results pave the way for quantum computation with single atoms trapped in a scalable optical lattice.