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arXiv:1710.05301 · Physical Review A

Controlling stray electric fields on an atom chip for experiments on Rydberg atoms

D. Davtyan, Shimon Machluf, Maarten L. Soudijn, Julian B. Naber, N. J. van Druten, H. B. van Linden van den Heuvell, R. J. C. Spreeuw

Published Feb 22, 2018• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Experiments handling Rydberg atoms near surfaces must necessarily deal with the high sensitivity of Rydberg atoms to (stray) electric fields that typically emanate from adsorbates on the surface. We demonstrate a method to modify and reduce the stray electric field by changing the adsorbate distribution. We use one of the Rydberg excitation lasers to locally affect the adsorbed dipole distribution. By adjusting the averaged exposure time we change the strength (with the minimal value less than $0.2\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{V}/\mathrm{cm}$ at $78\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}$ from the chip) and even the sign of the perpendicular field component. This technique is a useful tool for experiments handling Rydberg atoms near surfaces, including atom chips.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.97.023418

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Experiments handling Rydberg atoms near surfaces must necessarily deal with the high sensitivity of Rydberg atoms to (stray) electric fields that typically emanate from adsorbates on the surface. We demonstrate a method to modify and reduce the stray electric field by changing the adsorbate distribution. We use one of the Rydberg excitation lasers to locally affect the adsorbed dipole distribution. By adjusting the averaged exposure time we change the strength (with the minimal value less than 0.2V/cm0.2\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{V}/\mathrm{cm}0.2V/cm at 78\ensuremathμm78\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}78\ensuremathμm from the chip) and even the sign of the perpendicular field component. This technique is a useful tool for experiments handling Rydberg atoms near surfaces, including atom chips.
We investigate the behavior of electric fields originating from adsorbates deposited on a cryogenic atom chip as it is cooled from room temperature to cryogenic temperature. Using Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency, we measure the field strength versus distance from a 1 mm square of yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) patterned onto a yttria stabilized zirconia chip substrate. We find a localized and stable dipole field at room temperature and attribute it to a saturated layer of chemically adsorbed rubidium atoms on the YBCO. As the chip is cooled towards 83 K we observe a change in sign of the electric field as well as a transition from a localized to a delocalized dipole density. We relate these changes to the onset of physisorption on the chip surface when the van der Waals attraction overcomes the thermal desorption mechanisms. Our findings suggest that through careful selection of substrate materials, it may be possible to reduce the electric fields caused by atomic adsorption on chips, opening up experiments to controlled Rydberg-surface coupling schemes.
On one side, atom-chip experiments have demonstrated to be a versatile tool to study quantum physics in cold atoms systems. On the other side, Rydberg atoms have exaggerated properties that makes them good candidates to study quantum information and quantum simulations protocols. In this thesis both system are put together with the aim to study Rydberg physics (in particular atom-atom interaction) in an atom-chip experiment. Due to the exaggerated properties of Rydberg atoms they are very sensitive to electric fields. Thus, the combination of Rydberg atoms with surfaces can be challenging. Therefore a detailed characterization of the mentioned stray electric fields via the analysis of Stark-Zeeman maps is crucial. We employ two-photon Rydberg Stark spectroscopy of a micron-sized cloud of magnetically trapped ultracold rubidium atoms to characterize the electric fields near our atom-chip. Once we characterized the local electric fields we were able to study in more detail the effect of Rydberg excitation in the ultracold cloud of atoms. For instance we observed the formation of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules in our system. In these molecules a ground state atom is weakly bound to the Rydberg electron. We also attempted to observe the effect of Rydberg blockade in the system by looking at the characteristics of Rydberg spectra. Finally we studied the possibility of inducing rf transitions within a Rydberg state manifold in order to enhance our detection method and populate states that are not accessible directly with a two-photon laser transition.
We demonstrate spatially resolved, coherent excitation of Rydberg atoms on an atom chip. Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is used to investigate the properties of the Rydberg atoms near the gold-coated chip surface. We measure distance-dependent shifts ( ~ 101010 MHz) of the Rydberg energy levels caused by a spatially inhomogeneous electric field. The measured field strength and distance dependence is in agreement with a simple model for the electric field produced by a localized patch of Rb adsorbates deposited on the chip surface during experiments. The EIT resonances remain narrow (<4<4<4 MHz) and the observed widths are independent of atom-surface distance down to  ~ 202020 $\ensuremath{\mu}$m, indicating relatively long lifetime of the Rydberg states. Our results open the way to studies of dipolar physics, collective excitations, quantum metrology, and quantum information processing involving interacting Rydberg excited atoms on atom chips.
Rydberg atoms are highly sensitive to external electric fields due to their exaggerated electronic properties. This unique feature lays the foundation for many of their applications in quantum science. However, an uncontrolled stray electric field can be detrimental, severely degrading their quantum control. In this work, we demonstrate a universal scheme that relies on the efficient creation of an in-vacuum plasma source by photo-ionizing laser-cooled atoms to eliminate detrimental electric fields in a Rydberg-atom tweezer array platform, requiring only readily available resources. With this method, we began with a Stark-ionized Rydberg continuum spectrum caused by a large, unknown stray electric field and ultimately recovered stable, coherent excitation of an individual Rydberg state after fully eliminating the field. Our method is directly applicable to existing Rydberg-atom platforms and can also be useful in other experiments sensitive to stray electric fields.
Trapping a Rydberg atom close to a surface is an important step towards the realisation of many proposals for quantum information processing or hybrid quantum systems. One of the challenges in these experiments is posed by the electric field emanating from contaminations on the surface. Here we report on measurements of an electric field created by 87 Rb atoms adsorbed on a 25 nm thick layer of SiO 2 , covering a 90 nm layer of Au. The electric field is measured using a two-photon transition to the and states. The electric field value that we measure is higher than typical values measured above metal surfaces, but is consistent with a recent measurement above a SiO 2 surface. In addition, we measure the temporal behaviour of the field and observe that we can reduce it in a single experimental cycle, using ultraviolet light or by mildly locally heating the surface with one of the excitation lasers, whereas the buildup of the field takes thousands of cycles. We explain these results by a change in the adatom distribution on the surface. These results indicate that, while the stray electric field can be reduced, achieving field-free conditions above a silica-coated gold chip remains challenging.
Electrometry near a dielectric surface is performed using Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency. The large polarizability of high-nnn-state Rydberg atoms gives this method extreme sensitivity. We show that dipoles produced by adsorbates on the dielectric surface produce a significant electric field that responds to an applied field with a time constant of order 1 s. For transient applied fields (with a time scale of less than 1 s) we observe good agreement with calculations based on numerical solutions of Laplace's equation using an effective dielectric constant to simulate the bulk dielectric.