Full-Continuum Ultrafast Quantum Gas Microscopy
Abstract
Quantum gas microscopy provides single-shot access to many-body configurations, yet has so far relied on pinning atoms to a discrete lattice during fluorescence readout. Here, we realize ultrafast atom-resolved fluorescence microscopy of an ultracold 162Dy gas directly in free space, with all external confinement removed during imaging. Exploiting the large mass and broad optical transition of dysprosium together with a high numerical aperture in-vacuum objective, we detect single atoms within 4 μs while maintaining an effective point-spread function with a full width at half maximum of 254.8(3) nm. We achieve a single-atom conditional classification fidelity of 99.72(3)% for identified fluorescence candidates. We use the measured single-atom response to construct a statistical configuration-inference model that recovers atomic positions and multiplicities, coming from overlapping atoms, directly from single fluorescence snapshots. We further benchmark our reconstruction algorithm through end-to-end Monte Carlo simulations with known ground-truth atomic configurations, obtaining a reconstruction fidelity of 98.7%. Our approach, applicable to a wide variety of atomic species, extends quantum gas microscopy beyond predefined detection lattices, enabling atom-resolved measurements of counting statistics and higher-order spatial correlations directly on the intrinsic length scales of continuum many-body systems.
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BibTeX
@misc{litvinov2026fullcontinuum,
title = {{Full-Continuum Ultrafast Quantum Gas Microscopy}},
author = {Andrea Litvinov and Clemens Ulm and Eva Casotti and Gerard Solà Berga and Manfred J. Mark and Francesca Ferlaino},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18994},
eprint = {2610.18994},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18994},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Full-Continuum Ultrafast Quantum Gas Microscopy
AU - Andrea Litvinov
AU - Clemens Ulm
AU - Eva Casotti
AU - Gerard Solà Berga
AU - Manfred J. Mark
AU - Francesca Ferlaino
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18994
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18994
AB - Quantum gas microscopy provides single-shot access to many-body configurations, yet has so far relied on pinning atoms to a discrete lattice during fluorescence readout. Here, we realize ultrafast atom-resolved fluorescence microscopy of an ultracold ^162Dy gas directly in free space, with all external confinement removed during imaging. Exploiting the large mass and broad optical transition of dysprosium together with a high numerical aperture in-vacuum objective, we detect single atoms within 4 μs while maintaining an effective point-spread function with a full width at half maximum of 254.8(3) nm. We achieve a single-atom conditional classification fidelity of 99.72(3)% for identified fluorescence candidates. We use the measured single-atom response to construct a statistical configuration-inference model that recovers atomic positions and multiplicities, coming from overlapping atoms, directly from single fluorescence snapshots. We further benchmark our reconstruction algorithm through end-to-end Monte Carlo simulations with known ground-truth atomic configurations, obtaining a reconstruction fidelity of 98.7%. Our approach, applicable to a wide variety of atomic species, extends quantum gas microscopy beyond predefined detection lattices, enabling atom-resolved measurements of counting statistics and higher-order spatial correlations directly on the intrinsic length scales of continuum many-body systems.
ER -