Progress toward strongly coupled Ytterbium cavity-atom arrays

Arrays of neutral atoms are a powerful platform for quantum computation, simulation, and metrology. However, strongly coupling single atoms in a large array to single photons through optical cavities remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we report progress toward an experimental platform that combines arrays of Ytterbium atoms with arrays of wavelength-scale waist optical cavities operating in the strong-coupling regime [1, 2]. The cavity array is designed at the 556 nm intercombination line and will enable fast, parallel readout of the atomic state. It will also enable fast, multiplexed bell-pair generation. We envision faster error-correction cycle times and applications in quantum networking of alkaline earth processors and distributed quantum computing. Combined with Ytterbium’s narrow clock transition, this platform has potential for scalable, high-duty-cycle optical tweezer clocks as well as entangled tweezer clock networks.

[1] Danial Shadmany et al., Cavity QED in a high NA resonator.Sci. Adv.11, eads8171 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads8171

[2] A. L. Shaw et al., A cavity array microscope for parallel single-atom interfacing, arXiv:2506.10919 (2025)