Our targeted breakthrough is to construct a new platform consisting of a many-atom Ytterbium optical tweezer array integrated with a cavity QED setup.

It has long been known that photons could mediate strong interactions of long-range character. In practice, however, large and uncontrolled dissipation in the form of atomic spontaneous emission greatly limits the interaction fidelities.

Our setup will instead harness spontaneous emission as a correlated form of dissipation, which can be suppressed and even utilized for dissipation engineering given the ability to controllably position atoms at sub-wavelength distances.

The anticipated increases in interaction fidelities (to the ~99% level), along with the capabilities for long-range interactions, engineered dissipation, and single-atom control and read-out will make such a platform a leading candidate for future applications in quantum simulation and metrology to produce novel exotic dissipative phases of matter and to investigate entanglement and non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly correlated systems.