We propose to use adiabatic rapid passage with a chirped laser pulse in the strong dipole blockade regime to deterministically excite only one Rydberg atom from randomly loaded optical dipole traps or optical lattices. The chirped laser excitation is shown to be insensitive to the random number N of the atoms in the traps. Our method overcomes the problem of the N dependence of the collective Rabi frequency, which was the main obstacle for deterministic single-atom excitation in the ensembles with unknown N, and can be applied for single-atom loading of dipole traps and optical lattices.
We demonstrate Rydberg blockade due to the charge-dipole interaction between a single Rb atom and a single RbCs molecule confined in optical tweezers. The molecule is formed by magnetoassociation of a Rb+Cs atom pair and subsequently transferred to the rovibrational ground state with an efficiency of 91(1)%. Species-specific tweezers are used to control the separation between the atom and molecule. The charge-dipole interaction causes blockade of the transition to the Rb(52s) Rydberg state, when the atom-molecule separation is set to 310(40) nm. The observed excitation dynamics are in good agreement with simulations using calculated interaction potentials. Our results open up the prospect of a hybrid platform where quantum information is transferred between individually trapped molecules using Rydberg atoms.