Extended Data Fig. 2: Release and recapture in optical lattices.
From: Multi-qubit gates and Schrödinger cat states in an optical clock
a, Schematic of the release and recapture process. The atoms expand from an initially well-localized state while the lattice is off and, when excited to the Rydberg state, the atoms will also undergo a centre-of-mass displacement owing to the momentum recoil of the UV photon. When the lattice is turned back on, the wavefunction will be projected both into higher-band Wannier orbitals as well as nearby sites, causing both loss and heating. b, Top, measured survival as a function of time that the lattice is turned off for the ground state (blue circles) and Rydberg state (purple). The solid lines are theoretical predictions for the recapture probability from an approximately 50Er lattice (see Methods). At short times, the Rydberg-state survival decreases quadratically and we fit a Gaussian 1/e decay time of 8.7(1) μs. Bottom, theoretically predicted increase in mean phonon number (see Methods) for recaptured atoms over the same duration. The heating is quadratic at short times but begins to taper off as the highest-energy atoms are lost. The lattice turn-off duration is <2 μs for all data shown in the main text.
