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arXiv:1907.07685 · Physical Review Research

Rydberg impurity in a Fermi gas: Quantum statistics and rotational blockade

John Sous, H. R. Sadeghpour, T. C. Killian, Eugene Demler, Richard Schmidt

Published Apr 9, 2020• 33 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The authors demonstrate that a Rydberg impurity in a Fermi sea leads to a formation of a shell structure of occupied orbitals analogous to the nuclear shell model. At low gas densities, the paper uncovers a rotational blockade that inhibits molecule formation. This suppressed chemical reactivity also leaves its trace in the high-density regime.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.023021

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The authors demonstrate that a Rydberg impurity in a Fermi sea leads to a formation of a shell structure of occupied orbitals analogous to the nuclear shell model. At low gas densities, the paper uncovers a rotational blockade that inhibits molecule formation. This suppressed chemical reactivity also leaves its trace in the high-density regime.
We consider the quench of an atomic impurity via a single Rydberg excitation in a degenerate Fermi gas. The Rydberg interaction with the background gas particles induces an ultralong-range potential that binds particles to form dimers, trimers, tetramers, etc. Such oligomeric molecules were recently observed in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. In this work, we demonstrate with a functional determinant approach that quantum statistics and fluctuations have observable spectral consequences. We show that the occupation of molecular states is predicated on the Fermi statistics, which suppresses molecular formation in an emergent molecular shell structure. At large gas densities this leads to spectral narrowing, which can serve as a probe of the quantum gas thermodynamic properties.
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 dependences 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.
In this work I describe the excitation spectra of Rydberg atoms in ultracold gases of strontium and their decay mechanisms. In a few-body regime, we observe a highly structured spectrum re ecting excitation of ultralong-range molecules consisting of one or more ground-state atoms bound to the Rydberg core in potential wells formed by the Rydbergelectron wave function. In a many-body regime, with hundreds of ground-state atoms within the Rydberg orbital, the Rydberg atoms can be viewed as an impurity in a quantum gas, connecting to important concepts in condensed matter physics. The spectrum for impurity excitation displays signatures of polaronic states, in which the Rydberg atom signi cantly perturbs the density of the background gas. Additionally, decay channels of Rydberg excitations are examined by monitoring the time evolution of Rydberg populations. The measured lifetimes reveal new information on the decay processes of Rydberg molecules and place limits on the time scales over which studies involving Rydberg species in cold, dense atomic gases can be undertaken and limit the coherence times for such measurements.
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