Cold Rydberg atoms in strong magnetic fields

T. Pohl, H.R. Sadeghpour, P. Schmelcher

Brenton Knuffman, Cornelius Hempel, Rahul R. Mhaskar +3 more

Lu Ma, David Alexander Anderson, Rachel Sapiro +1 more

Thomas Pohl, H. R. Sadeghpour, Peter Schmelcher

Cold Rydberg atoms exposed to strong magnetic fields possess unique properties which open the pathway for an intriguing many-body dynamics taking place in Rydberg gases, consisting of either matter or anti-matter systems. We review both the foundations and recent developments of the field in the cold and ultracold regime where trapping and cooling of Rydberg atoms have become possible. Exotic states of moving Rydberg atoms, such as giant dipole states, are discussed in detail, including their formation mechanisms in a strongly magnetized cold plasma. Inhomogeneous field configurations influence the electronic structure of Rydberg atoms, and we describe the utility of corresponding effects for achieving tightly trapped ultracold Rydberg atoms. We review recent work on large, extended cold Rydberg gases in magnetic fields and their formation in strongly magnetized ultracold plasmas through collisional recombination. Implications of these results for current antihydrogen production experiments are pointed out, and techniques for the trapping and cooling of such atoms are investigated.

Daniel Kleppner, Michael G. Littman, Myron L. Zimmerman

Jaehoon Choi

Cold Rydberg atoms and ultracold plasmas have been studied in the strong-magnetization regime. In this new territory, novel atomic and plasma states---such as guiding-center drift Rydberg attains and strongly magnetized, quasi-neutral, ultracold plasmas---have been created and investigated. The evolution dynamics studies of these exotic diamagnetic forms of matter, made possible by implementing a superconducting magnetic atom trap, revealed rich dynamical features in the systems: The Landau-quantized energy structure has led to entirely different evolutions of the highly excited atoms in laser-excited or drift Rydberg states than in magnetic-field-free cases; and the presence of the strong magnetic field has drastically altered the collisional behavior and expansion dynamics of the plasmas. Furthermore, atom cooling and trapping methodology has been extended in multiple directions. Firstly, laser cooling and magnetic trapping of ground-state atoms has been demonstrated in magnetic; fields exceeding 3 Tesla, representing a 20-fold increase in the field-strength of cold-atom traps. Secondly, the trapping of Rydberg atoms with a lifetime of 80 ms has been achieved. This trapping technique exploits the quasi-free nature of Rydberg electrons, which can be adopted in other forms of Rydberg-atom trapping. Lastly; the trapping of two-component, ultracold plasmas has been demonstrated in a nested Penning-trap configuration. The confinement of quasi-neutral ultracold plasmas allowed us to observe novel effects such as the correlation between the ionic oscillation and the electron energy distribution.