High-efficiency loading of 2,400 Ytterbium atoms in optical tweezer arrays

Abstract: Neutral atom arrays have emerged as a powerful platform for quantum computation, simulation, and metrology. Among them, alkaline-earth-like atoms exhibit distinct advantages, including long coherence time and high-fidelity Rydberg gates. However, their scalability has lagged behind that of the alkali atoms. Here, we report 2,400 Ytterbium-174 atoms trapped in an optical tweezer array with enhanced single-atom loading efficiency of 83.5(1)%. Notably, the loading efficiency is largely maintained for array sizes ranging from dozens to thousands, exhibiting excellent scalability. We demonstrate the broad applicability of the enhanced loading method by showing that the enhancement exists robustly across a range of interatomic potentials, suggesting its utility for other atomic species. To establish the capability of the 174Yb arrays toward universal quantum computation, we propose to encode the qubit in the ground-clock state manifold and estimate a 99.9% two-qubit gate fidelity with experimentally feasible parameters. Our work advances the prospects for realizing large-scale quantum computers using alkaline-earth-like atoms.