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arXiv:1611.01085 · Physical Review A

Anomalous excitation facilitation in inhomogeneously broadened Rydberg gases

Fabian Letscher, O. Thomas, Thomas Niederprüm, Herwig Ott, Michael Fleischhauer

Published Feb 14, 2017• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

When atomic gases are laser driven to Rydberg states in an off-resonant way, a single Rydberg atom may enhance the excitation rate of surrounding atoms. This leads to a facilitated excitation referred to as Rydberg antiblockade. In the usual facilitation scenario, the detuning of the laser from resonance compensates the interaction shift. Here, we discuss a different excitation mechanism, which we call anomalous facilitation. This occurs on the ``wrong side'' of the resonance and originates from inhomogeneous broadening. The anomalous facilitation may be seen in experiments of attractively interacting atoms on the blue detuned side, where facilitation is not expected to appear.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.95.023410

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When atomic gases are laser driven to Rydberg states in an off-resonant way, a single Rydberg atom may enhance the excitation rate of surrounding atoms. This leads to a facilitated excitation referred to as Rydberg antiblockade. In the usual facilitation scenario, the detuning of the laser from resonance compensates the interaction shift. Here, we discuss a different excitation mechanism, which we call anomalous facilitation. This occurs on the ``wrong side'' of the resonance and originates from inhomogeneous broadening. The anomalous facilitation may be seen in experiments of attractively interacting atoms on the blue detuned side, where facilitation is not expected to appear.
Due to the intrinsic strong blockaded interaction shifting the energy level of the Rydberg state, the steady Rydberg probability may be substantially restrained to a low level, especially for atoms suffering from weak driving. We report an exotic excitation facilitation using strong blockaded energy shifting the double excitation state, leading to the weakly driven atom deterministically excited by a significantly improved fraction even at far off-resonant regimes. This phenomenon is attributed to the effective induction of a reduced detuning to the weakly driven atom by optimizing parameters of an auxiliary strongly driven atom, arising from a modified large probability preserved for a broadening range of detuning. The influence from breaking the blockade condition on the excitation probability is also discussed. In contrast to previous approaches, our excitation facilitation mechanism does not rely on the antiblockade effect to the compensation of Rydberg energy, serving as a fresh way to a deterministic single-atom excitation of the target atom in a pair of heteronuclear Rydberg atoms, where a strong interatomic interaction is required.
Resonant laser excitation of multiple Rydberg atoms are prohibited, leading to Rydberg blockade, when the long-range van der Waals interactions are stronger than the laser-atom coupling. Rydberg blockade can be violated, i.e., simultaneous excitation of more than one Rydberg atom, by off-resonant laser excitation, causing an excitation antiblockade. Rydberg antiblockade gives rise to strongly correlated many-body dynamics and spin-orbit coupling and also finds quantum computation applications. Instead of commonly used van der Waals interactions, we investigate antiblockade dynamics of two Rydberg atoms interacting via dipole-dipole exchange interactions. We study typical situations in current Rydberg atom experiments, where different types of dipole-dipole interactions can be achieved by varying Rydberg state couplings. An effective Hamiltonian governing underlying antiblockade dynamics is derived. We illustrate that geometric gates can be realized with the Rydberg antiblockade which is robust against the decay of Rydberg states. Our study may stimulate new experimental and theoretical exploration of quantum optics and strongly interacting many-body dynamics with Rydberg antiblockade driven by dipole-dipole interactions.
Abstract We present distinct antiblockade features of strongly interacting 64D 5/2 Rydberg atoms employing a two-color excitation scheme. The first color (pulse A) is set to resonantly excite a few seed Rydberg atoms, each of which establishes a blockade region due to the long-range multipole interactions. The second color (pulse B) is blue detuned so that the multipole-interaction-induced shifts of certain atoms are well compensated to result in the antiblockade effect. We find in particular that a few seed atoms can lead to a remarkable difference of the Rydberg excitation in the presence of pulse B for a wide range of blue detuning. Relevant dynamics of this antiblockade excitation is also investigated by varying the pulse-B duration for a fixed blue detuning, further confirming the facilitation process of Rydberg excitation accompanied by a saturation effect. These experimental results can be well recovered by theoretical simulations based on a multilevel two-body model.
Rydberg antiblockade, or facilitation, governs interaction-assisted excitation dynamics that generate a wide variety of collective phenomena and correlated many-body behavior, while also forming the basis of protocols for entangling gates, state transfer, and quantum sensing. Despite its rich physics, experimental realization of facilitation has been fragile because the resonance condition requires precise matching between interaction shifts and laser detuning, making the process highly sensitive to atomic position disorder and parameter fluctuations. To overcome this limitation, we develop a robust implementation of Rydberg facilitation based on rapid adiabatic passage. By adiabatically sweeping the laser detuning across the interaction-shifted resonance, our approach is inherently insensitive to typical experimental imperfections. As a direct demonstration, we show that this adiabatically protected facilitation naturally gives rise to avalanche excitation growth in both one- and two-dimensional arrays. This avalanche process yields high gain with exceptionally low background, making it promising for rare-event detection. More broadly, by completely eliminating disorder sensitivity, our approach transforms Rydberg facilitation from an experimentally elusive regime into a robust mechanism implementable with standard cooling techniques and existing optical tweezer platforms, bridging the gap between theoretical proposals and disorder-free experimental realizations of antiblockade-based quantum control.
We develop the research achievement of recent work [G\"arttner et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 233002 (2014)], in which an anomalous excitation enhancement is observed in a three-level Rydberg-atom ensemble with many-body coherence. In our theoretical analysis, this effect is ascribed to the existence of a quasidark state as well as its avoided crossings to nearby Rydberg-dressed states. Moreover, we show that with an appropriate control of the optical detuning to the intermediate state, the enhancement can evoke a direct facilitation to atom-light coupling that even breaks through the conventional N\sqrt{N}N​ limit of strong-blockaded ensembles. As a consequence, the intensity of the probe laser for intermediate transition can be reduced considerably, increasing the feasibility of experiments with Rydberg-dressed atoms.
We observe interaction-induced broadening of the two-photon 5s-18s transition in ^{87}Rb atoms trapped in a 3D optical lattice. The measured linewidth increases by nearly 2 orders of magnitude with increasing atomic density and excitation strength, with corresponding suppression of resonant scattering and enhancement of off-resonant scattering. We attribute the increased linewidth to resonant dipole-dipole interactions of 18s atoms with blackbody induced population in nearby np states. Over a range of initial atomic densities and excitation strengths, the transition width is described by a single function of the steady-state density of Rydberg atoms, and the observed resonant excitation rate corresponds to that of a two-level system with the measured, rather than natural, linewidth. The broadening mechanism observed here is likely to have negative implications for many proposals with coherently interacting Rydberg atoms.