Experimental verification of heating suppression during smooth polarization-zone transport

Verify experimentally whether smoothing the polarization transition between distinct optical-tweezer zones suppresses the atom heating responsible for reduced clock-qubit coherence during transport across an abrupt polarization boundary.

Background

The paper measures clock-qubit coherence during transport across polarization-defined zones. Transport across a sharp polarization step reduces the spin-echo contrast, and the authors attribute this reduction to motional heating caused by the abrupt spatial change in tweezer polarization.

A linear phase ramp across the polarization boundary restores atom survival to the uniform-polarization baseline even for a large polarization change. The authors therefore expect that a smooth transition will also suppress heating during coherent transport, but the corresponding coherence measurement was not performed and is explicitly left for future work.

References

Since the clock transition is insensitive to tweezer polarization (both states possess zero total electronic angular momentum), we attribute this contrast reduction to atom heating during transport. As shown earlier, smoothing the polarization transition restores the baseline survival even for $|\Delta\theta| = \pi/2$, and we expect this approach to suppress heating as well. We leave an explicit experimental test to future work.

— Local polarization control of optical tweezer arrays  (2610.12406 - Sun et al., 8 Oct 2026) in Section “Atom Transport Across Polarization Zones,” final paragraph