Exciting Rydberg atoms in cavities

Kashif Ammar Yasir, Wu-Ming Liu

Christine Guerlin, E. Brion, Tilman Esslinger +1 more

The realization of a Jaynes-Cummings model in the optical domain is proposed for an atomic ensemble. The scheme exploits the collective coupling of the atoms to a quantized cavity mode and the nonlinearity introduced by coupling to high-lying Rydberg states. A two-photon transition resonantly couples the single-atom ground state $|g\ensuremath{\rangle}$ to a Rydberg state $|e\ensuremath{\rangle}$ via a nonresonant intermediate state $|i\ensuremath{\rangle}$, but due to the interaction between Rydberg atoms only a single atom can be resonantly excited in the ensemble. This restricts the state space of the ensemble to the collective ground state $|G\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and the collectively excited state $|E\ensuremath{\rangle}$ with a single Rydberg excitation distributed evenly on all atoms. The collectively enhanced coupling of all atoms to the cavity field with coherent coupling strengths which are much larger than the decay rates in the system leads to the strong coupling regime of the resulting effective Jaynes-Cummings model. We use numerical simulations to show that the cavity transmission can be used to reveal detailed properties of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder of excited states and that the atomic nonlinearity gives rise to highly nontrivial photon emission from the cavity. Finally, we suggest that the absence of interactions between remote Rydberg atoms may, due to a combinatorial effect, induce a cavity-assisted excitation blockade whose range is larger than the typical Rydberg dipole-dipole interaction length.

Zhiming Zhan, Wen‐Xing Yang, Jiahua Li

We present a simple scheme to generate a maximally entangled state of two four-level Rydberg atoms with a nonresonant cavity by cavity-assisted collisions. By using this scheme, the maximally entangled state of two N-level (N>4) Rydberg atoms can also be obtained. During the passage of the atoms through the cavity field, they are only virtually excited. There is no quantum information that will be transferred from the atoms to the cavity in this case.

詹志明, Wen‐Xing Yang, 李家华

We present a simple scheme to generate a maximally entangled state of two four-level Rydberg atoms with a nonresonant cavity by cavity-assisted collisions. By using this scheme, the maximally entangled state of two N-level (N > 4) Rydberg atoms can also be obtained. During the passage of the atoms through the cavity field, they are only virtually excited. There is no quantum information that will be transferred from the atoms to the cavity in this case.

B. B. Zelener, B. V. Zelener, E.B. Zelener