Please join us for this week’s AMO/QI seminar featuring Dr. Nelson Oppong, JILA. He will be presenting a talk titled: Making, probing, and using 'Schrödinger cat' states in an optical clock

While optical atomic clocks continue to reach unprecedented levels of precision and accuracy, an important question concerns how quantum entanglement can be harnessed to improve their performance below the standard quantum limit. Our experiment combines techniques from atom arrays with the optical clock qubit of strontium to address this question. In this talk, I will discuss how we use laser-controlled Rydberg interactions to implement a multi-qubit gate for preparing 'Schrödinger cat' states on the clock qubit. We directly probe the performance of these Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger type cat states in an atom-laser comparison and demonstrate performance below the standard quantum limit for short dark times. Using the programmability of our platform for the preparation of multiple atomic ensembles with variable sizes, we also explore a potential pathway toward Heisenberg-limited scaling of atomic clock precision.