Multi-qubit entanglement for clock states of neutral atoms

Dynamically programmable arrays of neutral atoms are a promising platform for quantum computation and simulation with the potential to host large-scale entanglement. Current demonstrations of up to twenty-qubit entanglement [1], based on encoding on a ground and a Rydberg level, suffer from a short lifetime due to decay of the Rydberg level. We propose a scheme to generate entanglement using clock-state qubits---information encoded on hyperfine levels of the atomic ground state---that are relatively stable with a long lifetime. We propose a highly detuned coupling of the ground state to a Rydberg level to engineer weak non-linear dressing of clock states, which results in an all-to-all interaction between atoms trapped within a Rydberg blockaded region. Our scheme enables single-shot generation of highly entangled states and multi-component Schrödinger cat states on more than thirty qubits.

[1] A. Omran et al., Science 365, 570-574 (2019).