Fast single-atom preparation in optical tweezers via Rydberg blockade

Continuously replenished optical tweezer arrays will unlock unlimited-depth quantum circuits with neutral atom qubits. A key bottleneck limiting the cycle time of these systems is removing atoms from tweezers initially loaded with more than one atom. In the conventional technique of light-assisted collisions, slow collisional dynamics limit the timescale for removing excess atoms to several milliseconds. Here, we propose and demonstrate a scheme for selectively removing one atom at a time from multiply occupied tweezers on a microsecond timescale, using intra-tweezer Rydberg blockade and autoionization. We demonstrate the protocol in $^{171}$Yb in two complementary regimes. With two-photon Rydberg excitation from the ground state, we reduce multi-atom probability to 1% in 64.8 $\mu$s, while retaining single atoms in 58.2(2)% of the tweezers, which is comparable to the filling fraction achieved with light-assisted collisions under the same experimental conditions, but over two orders of magnitude faster. With single-photon excitation from the metastable state $^3P_0$, reduced single-atom loss enables a higher filling fraction of 74.8(3)%, at the cost of additional temporal overhead to prepare the atoms in $^3P_0$. The final filling fraction is limited by an unexplained two-body loss mechanism, which, if solved, could enable fast, quasi-deterministic loading.