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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Excitation suppression in an ultracold Rydberg gas due to a local van der Waals blockade

Edward E. Eyler, S. M. Farooqi, D. Tong, Jovica Stanojevic, S. Krishnan, Y. P. Zhang, Robin Côté, P. L. Gould

Published Jan 1, 2004• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We observe an excitation suppression effect due to van der Waals interactions between ultracold Rydberg atoms. The observed dependence of this effect on sample density suggests a viable blockade mechanism for realizing quantum gates.
DOI
10.1364/iqec.2004.imi6

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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.
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We review our recent experiments on interaction‐induced effects in a gas of Rydberg atoms excited from a laser‐cooled rubidium cloud. The van‐der‐Waals interaction between a pair of Rydberg atoms separated as far as 100,000 Bohr radii features two important effects: Spectral broadening of the resonance lines and suppression of excitation with increasing Rydberg density. The line broadenings are interpreted in terms of level shifts of Rydberg pairs due to their interaction. The density‐dependent suppression of excitation marks the onset of an interaction‐induced local blockade.
We report on simulations involving the blockade effect on a dense ultracold gas. The blockade effect is seen when the interaction energy between two excited Rydberg atoms is large enough to shift the two-excitation state out of resonance. In this paper we investigate a system that exhibits a strong van der Waals blockade, where only one out of thousands of atoms can be excited per blockade volume. With such a high number of atoms blockaded, the collective oscillation rate of an ensemble of atoms is much faster than the single atom oscillation rate. We examine the effects of this high density and the effects of a non-uniform density distribution as commonly seen in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). We use three different models and compare them to recent experimental data. The agreement between theory and experiment, although qualitative, suggests that the non-uniformity of the density within a blockade region presents a new challenge to theoretical models.