Cold Rydberg Atoms: Few Body Effects and High Order Interaction

Antoine Browaeys, Thierry Lahaye

Raffaele Faoro, Bruno Pelle, Alexandre Zuliani +3 more

Controlling the interactions between ultracold atoms is crucial for quantum simulation and computation purposes. Highly excited Rydberg atoms are considered in this prospect for their strong and controllable interactions known in the dipole-dipole case to induce non-radiative energy transfers between atom pairs, similarly to fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) in biological systems. Here we predict few-body FRET processes in Rydberg atoms and observe the first three-body resonance energy transfer in cold Rydberg atoms using cold caesium atoms. In these resonances, additional relay atoms carry away an energy excess preventing the two-body resonance, leading thus to a Borromean type of energy transfer. These few-body processes present strong similarities with multistep FRET between chromophores sometimes called donor-bridge-acceptor or superexchange. Most importantly, they generalize to any Rydberg atom and could lead to new implementations of few-body quantum gates or entanglement.

Georg A. Raithel

André Luiz de Oliveira, M. Mancini, Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato +1 more

Jianing Han, Juliet Michell, Morgan Umstead

Charge-dipole interactions are very common interactions among atoms and molecules, especially materials that can emit light or contain free charges. The second-order charge-dipole interactions, proportional to 1 R 4 , are stronger than the second-order dipole-dipole interactions or van der Waals interactions, proportional to 1 R 6 , at longer distances. In reality, there is more than one atom or charge; therefore, we focus on few-body charge-dipole interactions, such as charge-dipole-dipole interactions. Laser cooling and trapping allow us to study such interactions with much higher precision. In this article, charge-dipole interactions will be investigated in cold gases. To increase the interaction strength, we excite the cold atoms to highly excited states, Rydberg states. Here, we treat one Rydberg atom as a dipole; the excited electron and the ion core are the two poles of an electric dipole. Specifically, we study charge-atom interactions in cold Rydberg gases. The laser-cooled lower level atoms were excited to highly excited states, and we scanned a microwave to look at the line shape of a particular transition between two Rydberg states. It has been shown that adding a charge can enhance atom-atom interactions under certain circumstances.

Denis B. Tretyakov, Vasily M. Entin, Elena A. Yakshina +3 more

Long-range interactions between cold Rydberg atoms, which are used in many important applications, can be enhanced using F\"orster resonances between collective many-body states controlled by an external electric field. Here we report on the first experimental observation of highly resolved radio-frequency-assisted F\"orster resonances in a few cold Rb Rydberg atoms. We also observed radio-frequency-induced F\"orster resonances which cannot be tuned by a dc electric field. They imply an efficient transition from van der Waals to resonant dipole-dipole interaction due to Floquet sidebands of Rydberg levels appearing in the rf field. This method can be applied to enhance the interactions of almost arbitrary Rydberg atoms with large principal quantum numbers.