Neutral atoms trapped by laser light are among the most promising candidates for storing and processing information in a quantum computer or simulator. The application certainly calls for a scalable and flexible scheme for addressing and manipulating the atoms. We have now made this a reality by implementing a fast and versatile method to dynamically control the position of neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers. The tweezers result from a spatial light modulator (SLM) controlling and shaping a large number of optical dipole-force traps. Trapped atoms adapt to any change in the potential landscape, such that one can rearrange and randomly access individual sites within atom-trap arrays.

We propose a novel dipole trapping scheme using spatial light modulators (SLM) for the manipulation of individual atoms. The scheme uses a high numerical aperture microscope to map the intensity distribution of a SLM onto a cloud of cold atoms. The regions of high intensity act as optical dipole force traps. With a SLM fast enough to modify the trapping potential in real time, this technique is well suited for the controlled addressing and manipulation of arbitrarily selected atoms.

When used with coherent light, optical imaging systems, even diffraction-limited, are inherently unable to reproduce both the amplitude and the phase of a two-dimensional field distribution because their impulse response function varies slowly from point to point (a property known as non-isoplanatism). For sufficiently small objects, this usually results in a phase distortion and has no impact on the measured intensity. Here, we show that the intensity distribution can also be dramatically distorted when objects of large extension or of special shapes are imaged. We illustrate the problem using two simple examples: the pinhole camera and the aberration-free thin lens. The effects predicted by our theorical analysis are also confirmed by experimental observations.

We present a new scheme for trapping single atoms in separate dipole-traps and manipulating them individually. It relies on a spatial light-modulator to create the traps and will find applications in cavity-QED. !2008 Optical Society of AmericaOCIS codes: 020.0020, 020.3320, 020.7010, 020.1335 IntroductionFor quantum information processing and related areas, the ultimate control of individual qubits relies on the ability to arbitrarily manipulate, address and couple individual information carriers, like single atoms or single photons. Moreover, the interfacing of atoms and photons, the storage and retrieval of single photons and the state mapping between distant atoms are the essential building blocks of scalable quantum communication and distributed quantum-information processing networks [1].Cavity-QED with neutral atoms provides a very promising physical platform for implementing most of these elementary building blocks [2,3]. However, controlling and positioning atoms in optical micro-cavities still remains a challenging task. A flexible and scalable scheme for displacing atoms in or out of optical cavities is highly desirable.Here, we report on a new dipole-trapping scheme that will allow to trap single neutral atoms in separate dipole traps and to displace them individually in a plane on a length scale of about fifty microns.

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