Fast single-atom preparation in optical tweezers via Rydberg blockade

Recent advances in fast, mid-circuit tweezer loading have brightened the prospects for running deep, high-speed circuits on neutral atom processors [1-3]. However, removing one bottleneck leads to another, and repetition rates are now significantly limited by single atom preparation through light-assisted collisions (LAC) and rearrangement. We present a new scheme for single atom preparation, Ryd-Assisted Blockade-Based Individual atoms in Tweezers (RABBIT), which combines intra-trap Rydberg blockade with fast autoionization to remove extra atoms from tweezers one at a time on microsecond timescales. We experimentally demonstrate RABBIT using two-photon Rydberg excitation in Yb, reaching <1% multi-atom population in less than 100 µs, with 58% remaining single-atom occupancy, over 100x faster than LAC under the same conditions. The single-atom occupancy is limited by the contrast of two-photon Rydberg Rabi oscillations, but we project that this technique may be capable of near-deterministic single-atom preparation with single-photon Rydberg pulses. RABBIT is broadly applicable to atomic species where rapid loss can be induced from the Rydberg state.

[1] Y. Li, Y. Bao, M. Peper, C. Li, and J. D. Thompson, arXiv:2506.15633 (2025).

[2] N.C. Chiu et al., Nature 646, 1075 (2025).

[3] J.A. Muniz et al., Phys. Rev. X 15, 041040 (2025).