Single-atom cooling by superfluid immersion: A nondestructive method for qubits

We present a scheme to cool the motional state of neutral atoms confined in sites of an optical lattice by immersing the system in a superfluid. The motion of the atoms is damped by the generation of excitations in the superfluid, and under appropriate conditions the internal state of the atom remains unchanged. This scheme can thus be used to cool atoms used to encode a series of entangled qubits nondestructively. Within realizable parameter ranges, the rate of cooling to the ground state is found to be sufficiently large to be useful in experiments.