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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Towards exciting a Rydberg gas in optical lattices.

Manukumara Manjappa, Jingshan Han, Ruixiang Guo, Thibault Vogt, Wenhui Li

Published Jun 6, 2013• 0 citations
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It is shown that the two-step excitation scheme typically used to create an ultracold Rydberg gas can be described with an effective two-level rate equation, greatly reducing the complexity of the optical Bloch equations. This allows us to efficiently solve the many-body problem of interacting cold atoms with a Monte Carlo technique. Our results reproduce the observed excitation blockade effect. However, we demonstrate that an Autler-Townes double peak structure in the two-step excitation scheme, which occurs for moderate pulse lengths as used in the experiment, can give rise to an antiblockade effect. It is most pronounced for atoms arranged on a lattice. Since the effect is robust against a large number of lattice defects it should be experimentally realizable with an optical lattice created by CO2 lasers.
The subnanoscale size of typical diatomic molecules hinders direct optical access to their constituents. Rydberg macrodimers-bound states of two highly excited Rydberg atoms-feature interatomic distances easily exceeding optical wavelengths. We report the direct microscopic observation and detailed characterization of such molecules in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms in an optical lattice. The bond length of about 0.7 micrometers, comparable to the size of small bacteria, matches the diagonal distance of the lattice. By exciting pairs in the initial two-dimensional atom array, we resolved more than 50 vibrational resonances. Using our spatially resolved detection, we observed the macrodimers by correlated atom loss and demonstrated control of the molecular alignment by the choice of the vibrational state. Our results allow for rigorous testing of Rydberg interaction potentials and highlight the potential of quantum gas microscopy for molecular physics.
The laser excitation of Rydberg atoms in ultracold gases is often described assuming that the atomic motion is frozen during the excitation time. We show that this frozen gas approximation can break down for atoms that are held in optical lattices or microtraps. In particular, we show that the excitation dynamics is in general strongly affected by mechanical forces among the Rydberg atoms as well as the spread of the atomic wave packet in the confining potential. This causes decoherence in the excitation dynamics-resulting in a dissipative blockade effect-that renders the Rydberg excitation inefficient even in the antiblockade regime. For a strongly off-resonant laser excitation-usually considered in the context of Rydberg dressing-these motional effects compromise the applicability of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. In particular, our results indicate that they can also lead to decoherence in the dressing regime.