Cavity-Rydberg Hybrid Cold Atom Experiment

We describe a new hybrid cavity-Rydberg cold atom experiment under construction at the University of Michigan. The goals of this experiment are to study how entanglement structure develops in systems with local interactions and dissipation, and to use this understanding to optimally steer quantum systems towards useful target states. The experiment consists of a single-atom array of cesium atoms trapped inside a high-finesse optical cavity. Tweezer trapping light overlapped with shelving wavelengths enables weak and projective measurement on subsets of sites in the array. At the heart of the experiment is the joining of two powerful techniques for generating interactions between atoms: long range interactions mediated by the modes of the optical cavity and local many-body interactions enabled by the presence of Rydberg states. This unique combination of optically controllable methods for generating interactions will enable exquisite dynamical control, which will allow us to answer open questions concerning entanglement generation, growth, and control in many-body systems. In the near future, we will focus on probing the relationship between entanglement and chaos in the quantum kicked top, which will be implemented as a special case of the transverse-field Ising model (TFIM). Continuing experimental directions will include benchmarking partial density matrix tomography with new techniques for extracting entanglement metrics, using the chaotic regime of the quantum kicked top to study digital quantum simulation error in the TFIM, and developing optimal protocols for squeezing in the Trotterized TFIM.