State-dependent, addressable subwavelength lattices with cold atoms

We discuss how adiabatic potentials can be used to create addressable lattices on a subwavelength scale, which can be used as a tool for local operations and readout within a lattice substructure, while taking advantage of the faster timescales and higher energy and temperature scales determined by the shorter lattice spacing. For alkaline-earth-like atoms with nonzero nuclear spin, these potentials can be made state-dependent, for which we give specific examples with ¹⁷¹Yb atoms. We discuss in detail the limitations in generating the lattice potentials, in particular non-adiabatic losses, and show that the loss rates can always be made exponentially small by increasing the laser power.