No Arabic abstract
We develop a theoretical approach for the dynamics of Rydberg excitations in ultracold gases, with a realistically large number of atoms. We rely on the reduction of the single-atom Bloch equations to rate equations, which is possible under various experimentally relevant conditions. Here, we explicitly refer to a two-step excitation-scheme. We discuss the conditions under which our approach is valid by comparing the results with the solution of the exact quantum master equation for two interacting atoms. Concerning the emergence of an excitation blockade in a Rydberg gas, our results are in qualitative agreement with experiment. Possible sources of quantitative discrepancy are carefully examined. Based on the two-step excitation scheme, we predict the occurrence of an antiblockade effect and propose possible ways to detect this excitation enhancement experimentally in an optical lattice as well as in the gas phase.
In the laser excitation of ultracold atoms to Rydberg states, we observe a dramatic suppression caused by van der Waals interactions. This behavior is interpreted as a local excitation blockade: Rydberg atoms strongly inhibit excitation of their neighbors. We measure suppression, relative to isolated atom excitation, by up to a factor of 6.4. The dependence of this suppression on both laser irradiance and atomic density are in good agreement with a mean-field model. These results are an important step towards using ultracold Rydberg atoms in quantum information processing.
We demonstrate the interaction-induced blockade effect in an ultracold $^{88}$Sr gas via studying the time dynamics of a two-photon excitation to the triplet Rydberg series $5mathrm{s}nmathrm{s}, ^3textrm{S}_1$ for five different principle quantum numbers $n$ ranging from 19 to 37. By using a multi-pulse excitation sequence to increase the detection sensitivity we could identify Rydberg-excitation-induced atom losses as low as $<1%$. Based on an optical Bloch equation formalism, treating the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction on a mean-field level, the van der Waals coefficients are extracted from the observed dynamics, which agree fairly well with emph{ab initio} calculations.
We present a quantum many-body description of the excitation spectrum of Rydberg polarons in a Bose gas. The many-body Hamiltonian is solved with functional determinant theory, and we extend this technique to describe Rydberg polarons of finite mass. Mean-field and classical descriptions of the spectrum are derived as approximations of the many-body theory. The various approaches are applied to experimental observations of polarons created by excitation of Rydberg atoms in a strontium Bose-Einstein condensate.
We investigate a long-range interaction between $64D_{5/2}$ Rydberg-atom pairs and antiblockade effect employing a two-color excitation scheme. The first color (pulse A) is set to resonantly excite the Rydberg transition and prepare a few seed atoms, which establish a blockade region due to strong long-range interaction between Rydberg-atom pairs. The second color (pulse B) is blue detuned relative to Rydberg transition and enables further Rydberg excitation of atoms by counteracting the blockade effect. It is found that a few seed atoms lead to a huge difference of the Rydberg excitation with pulse B. The dynamic evolution of antiblockade excitation by varying the pulse-B duration at 30-MHz blue detuning is also investigated. The evolution result reveals that a small amount of seed atoms can trigger an avalanche Rydberg excitation. A modified superatom model is used to simulate the antiblockade effect and relevant dynamic evolution. The simulations are consistent with the experimental measurements.
We investigate the excitation dynamics of Rydberg atoms in ultracold atomic samples by expanding the excitation probability and the correlation function between excited atoms in powers of the isolated atom Rabi frequency $Omega$. In the Heisenberg picture, we give recurrence relations to calculate any order of the expansions, which ere expected to be well-behaved for arbitrarily strong interactions. For homogeneous large samples, we give the explicit form of the expansions, up to $Omega^4$, averaged over all possible random spatial distributions of atoms, for the most important cases of excitation pulses and interactions.