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Physical Review Letters

Breaking the Dipole Blockade: Nearly Resonant Dipole Interactions in Few-Atom Systems

Thomas Pohl, P. R. Berman

Published Jan 7, 2009• 83 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A dipole blockade, in which Rydberg-atom-Rydberg-atom interactions inhibit all but a single collective Rydberg excitation, has been proposed as a mechanism to store and manipulate quantum information in mesoscopic ensembles. We investigate the excitation dynamics of a collection of a few atoms and show that they undergo an unexpected, qualitative change when the number of atoms increases from two to three. In particular, the combined action of three atoms, each of which pairwise would produce a blockade, can break the dipole blockade.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.013004

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A dipole blockade, in which Rydberg-atom-Rydberg-atom interactions inhibit all but a single collective Rydberg excitation, has been proposed as a mechanism to store and manipulate quantum information in mesoscopic ensembles. We investigate the excitation dynamics of a collection of a few atoms and show that they undergo an unexpected, qualitative change when the number of atoms increases from two to three. In particular, the combined action of three atoms, each of which pairwise would produce a blockade, can break the dipole blockade.
We describe a technique for manipulating quantum information stored in collective states of mesoscopic ensembles. Quantum processing is accomplished by optical excitation into states with strong dipole-dipole interactions. The resulting "dipole blockade" can be used to inhibit transitions into all but singly excited collective states. This can be employed for a controlled generation of collective atomic spin states as well as nonclassical photonic states and for scalable quantum logic gates. An example involving a cold Rydberg gas is analyzed.
The dipole blockade of multiple Rydberg excitations in mesoscopic atomic ensembles allows the implementation of various quantum information tasks using collective states of cold, trapped atoms. Precise coherent manipulations of the collective ground and single Rydberg excitation states of an atomic ensemble requires the knowledge of the number of atoms with small uncertainty. We present an efficient method to acquire such information by interrogating the atomic ensemble with resonant pulses while monitoring the resulting Rydberg excitations. We show that after several such steps accompanied by feedback the number of atoms in an ensemble can be assessed with high accuracy. This will facilitate the realization of high-fidelity quantum gates, long-term storage of quantum information, and deterministic sources of single photons with Rydberg-blockaded atomic ensembles.
We investigate resonant dipole-dipole interactions between two superatoms of different angular momentum, consisting of two Rydberg-blockaded atom clouds where each cloud carries initially a coherently shared single excitation. We demonstrate that the dipole-dipole interaction breaks up the superatoms by removing the excitations from the clouds. The dynamics is akin to an ensemble average over systems where only one atom per cloud participates in entangled motion and excitation transfer. Our findings should thus facilitate the experimental realization of adiabatic exciton transport in Rydberg systems by replacing single sites with atom clouds.
Owing to the unique physical characteristics of Rydberg atoms, which play an important role in quantum information and quantum computation, the theoretical and applied research of Rydberg atoms have become the hot spots of scientific research in recent years. With the large polarizability of Rydberg atoms, even a small electric field could cause a considerable electric dipole moment, resulting in a strong dipole-dipole interaction between Rydberg atoms. The multiple excitations of the Rydberg states are strongly inhibited because of the strong dipole interaction between atoms within a mesoscopic interaction (blockade) region. We call this phenomenon the dipole blockade effect. The dipole blockade effect makes it possible to build single-photon quantum devices, implement quantum gates, generate quantum entanglement, and simulate many-body quantum problems, etc. A Rydberg atomic ensemble in the same blockade region can be regarded as a superatom. In the same way, if these atoms trapped in two optical dipole traps, each sub-ensemble can be considered as a sub-superatom which is closely related to the superatom. According to the fact that two Rydberg sub-superatoms can be strongly correlated due to sharing no more than one excited Rydberg atom, we study correlated collective excitation and quantum entanglement between two Rydberg sub-superatoms in a steady state. With the superatom model, the problem of exponentially increasing system size with the number of atoms can be circumvented to a certain extent in studying many-body physics. By solving the two-body Lindblad’s master equation accurately, we obtain the analytical expressions for the collective excitation probabilities of the two sub-superatoms, and the concurrence measuring the bipartite entanglement between them. Our results show that they are all sensitive to the number of atoms in each Rydberg superatom: the bigger (including more atoms) the Rydberg superatom, the higher the collective Rydberg excitation probability is. And that the maximally entangled state can only be obtained with two equal-sized Rydberg superatoms. When this condition is fulfilled, the mesoscopic entanglement can be generated by adding the number of atoms in each Rydberg superatom. This may provide an attractive platform for studying the quantum-classical correspondence and have potential promising applications in quantum information processing.
Abstract The dipole blockade effect at laser excitation of mesoscopic ensembles of Rydberg atoms lies in the fact that the excitation of one atom to a Rydberg state blocks the excitation of other atoms due to the shift in the collective energy levels of interacting Rydberg atoms. It is used to obtain the entangled qubit states based on single neutral atoms in optical traps. In this paper, we present our experimental results on the observation of the dipole blockade for mesoscopic ensembles of 1–5 atoms when they are detected by the selective field ionization method. We have investigated the spectra of the three-photon laser excitation 5S1/2 → 5P3/2 → 6S1/2 → nP3/2 of cold Rydberg Rb atoms in a magneto-optical trap. We have found that for mesoscopic ensembles this method allows only a partial dipole blockage to be observed. This is most likely related to the presence of parasitic electric fields reducing the interaction energy of Rydberg atoms, the decrease in the probability of detecting high states, and the strong angular dependence of the interaction energy of Rydberg atoms in a single interaction volume.
Rydberg states of atoms are of great current interest for quantum manipulation of mesoscopic samples of atoms. Long-range Rydberg–Rydberg interactions can inhibit multiple excitations of atoms under the appropriate conditions. These interactions are strongest when resonant collisional processes give rise to long-range C 3 / R 3 interactions. We show in this paper that even under resonant conditions C 3 often vanishes so that care is required to realize full dipole blockade in micron-sized atom samples.