Alkaline-earth atom arrays: from quantum-enhanced optical clocks to programmable Hubbard systems

In recent years, atom arrays have emerged as a versatile experimental platform enabling many exciting research directions in quantum science. In the strontium tweezer array experiment at JILA, we combine techniques from this novel platform with optical lattice potentials. In this way, we can not only engineer entangled many-body states of immobile particles, but also study the dynamics of itinerant and interacting particles. I will present our work on both of these frontiers in this talk. In particular, I will describe how we use non-equilibrium dynamics of an Ising and transverse-Ising model to create entangled states, which we use to demonstrate quantum-enhanced metrology in an optical clock. In the second part of the talk, I discuss our recent efforts to realize interacting Bose-Hubbard systems assembled from individually trapped and laser-cooled atoms. With such a system, we aim to explore questions concerning the preparation of many-body ground states and the emergence of dynamics strongly dependent on the initial state.