Towards quantum simulations of nuclear physics using optical tweezer arrays of Yb atoms

Quantum devices provide an opportunity to solve significant problems in nuclear physics, such as quantum many-body interactions, hadronization, and the nuclear matter equation of state, but large-scale, fault-tolerant, universal quantum computers for these tasks are still years away. Nevertheless, quantum simulators gain insight into such systems by mimicking their behavior. We trap ytterbium atoms in reconfigurable optical tweezer arrays, which are a promising platform for quantum simulation. The optical clock transition from the ground state enables precise quantum state manipulation with a long coherence time. We propose to study quark-level effective theories for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) with strong interaction enabled by coupling to Rydberg states. By expressing the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model as spin operators via Jordan–Wigner transformation, our system is suitable to explore chiral symmetry breaking and other non-perturbative phenomena in QCD.