Andrea CAVALLERI

Polar molecules, with their rich internal structure and tunable long-range interactions, have long been proposed for quantum information processing and quantum simulation of a wide range of many-body Hamiltonians. For these applications, the abilities to detect and manipulate individual particles are often useful and sometimes necessary. By offering microscopic detection and control at the single-molecule level, optical tweezer arrays of polar molecules therefore promise to be a new versatile platform for quantum science. In this talk, I will report on several recent advances from our group on controlling individual laser-cooled molecules trapped in rearrangeable tweezer arrays. I will describe our work on creating defect-free arrays of CaF molecules in 1D and observing coherent dipolar interactions between molecular pairs, and discuss how these results establish the building blocks for quantum information processing and simulation of quantum spin models. I will also describe our recent results towards full quantum control of laser-cooled molecules including their motional degrees of freedom. Specifically, I will report our latest work demonstrating Raman sideband cooling in molecules for the first time, and discuss how it provides a new pathway towards low-entropy molecular ensembles through laser-cooling.