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Frontiers in Optics

Interactions and Trapping of Cold Rydberg Atoms

Georg A. Raithel

Published Jan 1, 2006• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Collision-induced interactions of cold Rydberg atoms and the magnetic trapping of diamagnetic Rydberg atoms will be described. The effect of an excitation blockade on the statistics of the Rydberg-atom excitation number will also be discussed.
DOI
10.1364/ls.2006.ltua2

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Abstract : Research on interactions between quantum gases and impurities has become an active area of AMO. Here, two setups have been constructed and operated towards these goals. In the first, a metal tip (diameter 125 microns) is mounted close to a magneto-optic trap (MOT). Rydberg excitations are implanted in a cold-atom region (diameter about 10 microns, length about 50 microns). Interactions between the excitations cause excitation blockades, short- and medium-range order, as well as dynamics due to van-der-Waals interaction. All these topics were studied. The second setup is a double-trap system, in which magnetically trapped rubidium atom samples are prepared between 1 and 10 micro-Kelvin temperature and densities of about 1012 cm-3. Cold circular Rydberg atoms have been prepared and trapped. The dynamics of these highly dipolar atoms in the magnetic trap was studied, and collision-induced loss was observed and traced back to collisions between the long-lived circular atoms and cold ground state atoms. Novel D-type molecules between Rydberg and ground-state atoms were realized. These molecules are due to an attractive triplet s-wave low-energy electron scattering interaction. Five papers were published [two Phys. Rev. Lett, 2 Phys. Rev. A] and one submitted to PRL.
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