A team at Caltech led by Professor Manuel Endres has demonstrated hyper-entanglement in neutral atoms by simultaneously controlling their motion and internal energy states, marking a first for massive particles such as atoms. The researchers used optical tweezers to cool and trap alkaline-earth atoms, then applied active error-corrected cooling to bring atomic motion nearly to a standstill. This process enabled the team to excite atoms into superpositions of motion, forming the basis for encoding quantum information in their spatial oscillations.
The atoms were subsequently entangled across both their motional and electronic degrees of freedom—achieving a form of hyper-entanglement where two quantum properties are correlated simultaneously. This breakthrough expands the amount of information that can be encoded per atom and introduces motion as a viable and controllable resource for quantum technologies. The technique represents a new level of control over neutral atoms, building on existing capabilities in manipulating internal electronic states.
The study, titled “Erasure cooling, control, and hyperentanglement of motion in optical tweezers,” was published in Science and was supported by multiple U.S. agencies including the Army Research Office, NSF, DOE, and DARPA. According to Endres, this toolbox for atom-level control could enable new quantum computing architectures, simulations, and high-precision measurements.
More details can be found in Caltech’s article here.
May 23, 2025
