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Physics World

Electric pulses pack a punch

Bart Noordam

Published Dec 1, 1997• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

EVER since Rutherford and Bohr introduced the idea of electrons orbiting an atomic core, physicists have been interested in the behaviour of atoms that have an electron in a highly excited orbit. These so-called Rydberg atoms have been studied for decades, but recent advances in producing so-called half-cycle electrical pulses have opened a new era in this field. Rydberg atoms can be prepared and observed, and now the Rydberg electron can even be "kicked" in any direction as it orbits the atomic core. Three recent experiments have provided important new insights into the control of Rydberg electrons.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/10/12/20

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EVER since Rutherford and Bohr introduced the idea of electrons orbiting an atomic core, physicists have been interested in the behaviour of atoms that have an electron in a highly excited orbit. These so-called Rydberg atoms have been studied for decades, but recent advances in producing so-called half-cycle electrical pulses have opened a new era in this field. Rydberg atoms can be prepared and observed, and now the Rydberg electron can even be "kicked" in any direction as it orbits the atomic core. Three recent experiments have provided important new insights into the control of Rydberg electrons.
A whole community of physicists is under the spell of the oversized atoms called Rydberg atoms. Created when one or sometimes two of their electrons is excited to very high energy levels, far from the nuclear core, Rydberg atoms can detect subtle electric fields and probe chemical reactions that ordinarily proceed too fast for study. And because their outermost electrons sometimes orbit the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun—a behavior reminiscent of classical physics, not the quantum physics of the atom—physicists are using Rydberg atoms to study the border between the quantum and classical worlds.
Because of their unusual properties, Rydberg atoms, i.e., atoms with one electron occupying a highly excited orbit, have attracted the interest of many physicists. For example, due to their large size, such atoms are particularly sensitive to external fields. Fifty years ago, Segre and co-workers1 investigated the Stark effect and atomic diamagnetism of Rydberg states of alkalis with principal quantum numbers up to n = 30. During the last decade, Rydberg states have been studied extensively2 due to the availability of tunable laser radiation.
The past few years has seen an upsurge of interest in the Rydberg atom, described by H J Metcalf of the State University of New York in his review article in Nature (1980 280 127) as ‘an ion core and an isolated electron very far away, floating lazily around in a slow orbit, much like a distant planet of the solar system’. A single active electron is in a highly excited state where it is much less perturbed by the presence of the other electrons than it was in the lower states, bringing its behaviour closer to that in the ideal hydrogen-like model and making it a valuable subject for study.
The characteristics of quasi-one-dimensional (1D) high-nnn Rydberg atoms produced by photoexciting, in a weak dc field, extreme members of the n=350n=350n=350 Stark manifold are investigated by studying their ionization when subjected to unidirectional electric field pulses, termed half-cycle pulses (HCP's), of duration Tp⪡Tn{T}_{p}⪡{T}_{n}Tp​⪡Tn​ where Tn{T}_{n}Tn​ is the classical electron orbital period, directed both parallel and perpendicular to the atomic axis. The observed differences in the ionization characteristics provide a measure of the anisotropy of the momentum distribution. It is shown that HCP's applied transverse to the atomic axis provide a particularly sensitive probe of the quasi-1D nature of the state. The experimental data are in good agreement with the results of classical trajectory Monte Carlo simulations.
Ionization of Rydberg atoms by short, half-cycle electrical pulses is investigated experimentally in the intermediate-pulse duration regime where the ionization threshold fields are determined both by the slew rate of the ionizing pulse and its duration. Electrical pulses with durations ranging from 140 ps to 9 ns and amplitudes up to are applied to rubidium and lithium atoms prepared in high Rydberg states by laser excitation (n ranges from 42 to 82). The amplitude of the 140 ps pulse required for ionization of the Rb and Li Rydberg population is found to be a factor of two higher than the expected amplitude based on diabatic field ionization and recent theoretical calculations by Reinhold et al (1993 26 L659). Using the longer pulses we studied the transition from the diabatic/adabatic ionization towards ionization in the impulse-kick regime.