No Arabic abstract
We propose and analyze a new scheme to produce ultracold neutral plasmas deep in the strongly coupled regime. The method exploits the interaction blockade between cold atoms excited to high-lying Rydberg states and therefore does not require substantial extensions of current ultracold plasma experiments. Extensive simulations reveal a universal behavior of the resulting Coulomb coupling parameter, providing a direct connection between the physics of strongly correlated Rydberg gases and ultracold plasmas. The approach is shown to reduce currently accessible temperatures by more than an order of magnitude, which opens up a new regime for ultracold plasma research and cold ion-beam applications with readily available experimental techniques.
In plasmas at very low temperatures formation of neutral atoms is dominated by collisional three-body recombination, owing to the strong ~ T^(-9/2) scaling of the corresponding recombination rate with the electron temperature T. While this law is well established at high temperatures, the unphysical divergence as T -> 0 clearly suggest a breakdown in the low-temperature regime. Here, we present a combined molecular dynamics-Monte-Carlo study of electron-ion recombination over a wide range of temperatures and densities. Our results reproduce the known behavior of the recombination rate at high temperatures, but reveal significant deviations with decreasing temperature. We discuss the fate of the kinetic bottleneck and resolve the divergence-problem as the plasma enters the ultracold, strongly coupled domain.
We demonstrate the first deterministic entanglement of two individually addressed neutral atoms using a Rydberg blockade mediated controlled-NOT gate. Parity oscillation measurements reveal an entanglement fidelity of $F=0.58pm0.04$, which is above the entanglement threshold of $F=0.5$, without any correction for atom loss, and $F=0.71pm0.05$ after correcting for background collisional losses. The fidelity results are shown to be in good agreement with a detailed error model.
We have studied an ionization of alkali-metal Rydberg atoms by blackbody radiation (BBR). The results of the theoretical calculations of ionization rates of Li, Na, K, Rb and Cs Rydberg atoms are presented. Calculations have been performed for nS, nP and nD states which are commonly used in a variety of experiments, at principal quantum numbers n=8-65 and at the three ambient temperatures of 77, 300 and 600 K. A peculiarity of our calculations is that we take into account the contributions of BBR-induced redistribution of population between Rydberg states prior to photoionization and field ionization by extraction electric field pulses. The obtained results show that these phenomena affect both the magnitude of measured ionization rates and shapes of their dependences on n. A Cooper minimum for BBR-induced transitions between bound Rydberg states of Li has been found. The calculated ionization rates are compared with our earlier measurements of BBR-induced ionization rates of Na nS and nD Rydberg states with n=8-20 at 300 K. A good agreement for all states except nS with n>15 is observed. Useful analytical formulas for quick estimation of BBR ionization rates of Rydberg atoms are presented. Application of BBR-induced ionization signal to measurements of collisional ionization rates is demonstrated.
Quantum entanglement is crucial for simulating and understanding exotic physics of strongly correlated many-body systems, such as high--temperature superconductors, or fractional quantum Hall states. The entanglement of non-identical particles exhibits richer physics of strong many-body correlations and offers more opportunities for quantum computation, especially with neutral atoms where in contrast to ions the interparticle interaction is widely tunable by Feshbach resonances. Moreover, the inter-species entanglement forms a basis for the properties of various compound systems, ranging from Bose-Bose mixtures to photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes. So far, the inter-species entanglement has only been obtained for trapped ions. Here we report on the experimental realization of entanglement of two neutral atoms of different isotopes. A ${}^{87}mathrm{Rb}$ atom and a ${}^{85}mathrm{Rb}$ atom are confined in two single--atom optical traps separated by 3.8 $mu$m. Creating a strong Rydberg blockade, we demonstrate a heteronuclear controlled--NOT (C--NOT) quantum gate and generate a heteronuclear entangled state, with raw fidelities $0.73 pm 0.01$ and $0.59 pm 0.03$, respectively. Our work, together with the technologies of single--qubit gate and C--NOT gate developed for identical atoms, can be used for simulating any many--body system with multi-species interactions. It also has applications in quantum computing and quantum metrology, since heteronuclear systems exhibit advantages in low crosstalk and in memory protection.
We demonstrate experimentally that a single Rb atom excited to the $79d_{5/2}$ level blocks the subsequent excitation of a second atom located more than $10 murm m$ away. The observed probability of double excitation of $sim 30%$ is consistent with a theoretical model based on calculations of the long range dipole-dipole interaction between atoms.