Towards shielding-enhanced loading of NaCs molecules in an optical tweezer array

Optical tweezer arrays of ultracold polar molecules offer a promising platform for quantum simulation and quantum computation experiments. A key challenge for molecular tweezer arrays is scaling to large system sizes, which is limited by ground-state molecule loading efficiency. To improve this efficiency, we propose a new loading approach that first prepares co-trapped sodium (Na) and cesium (Cs) atomic ensembles in optical tweezers to create shielded ensembles of NaCs molecules. Electric field shielding will promote repulsive interactions between the molecules and suppress inelastic collisions, while additional electric field gradients will be used to controllably tilt the trapping potential to deterministically isolate a single molecule from each ensemble. We report our progress toward realizing this novel scheme.