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Optics Letters

Cavity-enhanced optical bistability of Rydberg atoms

Qinxia Wang, Zhihui Wang, Yanxin Liu, Shijun Guan, Jun He, Chang‐Ling Zou, Pengfei Zhang, Gang Li, Tiancai Zhang

Published Apr 24, 2023• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical bistability (OB) of Rydberg atoms provides a new, to the best of our knowledge, platform for studying nonequilibrium physics and a potential resource for precision metrology. To date, the observation of Rydberg OB has been limited in free space. Here, we explore cavity-enhanced Rydberg OB with a thermal cesium vapor cell. The signal of Rydberg OB in a cavity is enhanced by more than one order of magnitude compared with that in free space. The slope of the phase transition signal at the critical point is enhanced more than 10 times that without the cavity, implying an enhancement of two orders of magnitude in the sensitivity for Rydberg-based sensing and metrology.

DOI
10.1364/ol.486914

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•Jun 28, 2016•2 citations
Optical bistability (OB) of Rydberg atoms provides a new, to the best of our knowledge, platform for studying nonequilibrium physics and a potential resource for precision metrology. To date, the observation of Rydberg OB has been limited in free space. Here, we explore cavity-enhanced Rydberg OB with a thermal cesium vapor cell. The signal of Rydberg OB in a cavity is enhanced by more than one order of magnitude compared with that in free space. The slope of the phase transition signal at the critical point is enhanced more than 10 times that without the cavity, implying an enhancement of two orders of magnitude in the sensitivity for Rydberg-based sensing and metrology.
High-precision spectra of Rydberg atoms are of significance in studying the interaction between Rydberg atoms, the energy level structure of Rydberg atom, and the precision measurement of the electromagnetic field. To enhance the measurement sensitivity, it is necessary to achieve the high contrast, high signal-to-noise ratio, and narrow linewidth of the spectra of the Rydberg atoms. In this work, the cavity-enhanced spectra of Rydberg atoms are studied theoretically and experimentally. Comparing with the free-space spectra of Rydberg atoms, the contrast and the signal-to-noise ratio are enhanced by 11.5 times, with the linewidth unchanged. Under the condition of two-photon resonance, both the electro-magnetically induced transparency and the double-resonance optical-pumping process can suppress the absorption of the probe laser, thereby improving the impedance matching of the cavity. As the intracavity probe laser intensity turns stronger, the contrast and signal-to-noise ratio can be improved further, and the improvement depends on the transmission of the probe laser through the atom vapor. It is expected that the contrast and signal-to-noise ratio can be improved by a factor of 23 through optimizing the temperature of the cesium atom vapor. This work provides an important reference for improving the contrast of the spectra of Rydberg atoms and the sensitivity of Rydberg-based precision measurements.
Radio frequency antennas based on highly excited Rydberg atom vapors can in principle reach sensitivities beyond those of any conventional wire antenna, especially at lower frequencies where very long wires are needed to accommodate the growing wavelength. Conventional Rydberg sensors are based on individual atom response, with increased signal resolution relying on the O(103)O({10}^{3})O(103) electric dipole moment enhancement, scaling as the square of the Rydberg-state principal quantum number $N\ensuremath{\sim}50$. However, despite more than 30 years of steady advances, beyond-classical signal sensitivity has yet to be demonstrated. More recently, the optical bistability effect, a many-body nonequilibrium phase transition occurring at somewhat higher vapor densities, has been exploited for an order of magnitude or more increased sensitivity for some setups through tuning into the critical region. However, the results fall significantly short of those using more advanced ``conventional'' Rydberg sensor setups---which achieve even greater enhancement by exploiting resonant interaction between a pair of nearby Rydberg levels. This paper seeks to combine the many-body and resonant enhancement effects by extending the bistable phase analysis to include a pair of resonant Rydberg levels, supported by an exact treatment of the atom velocity thermal average. A dynamic linear response formalism is developed as well to explore the trade-off between measurement sensitivity and finite-bandwidth signals. We demonstrate regions of the phase diagram which could be exploited for record breaking, beyond-classical sensitivity. Of course, only a limited number of vapor parameters are under full experimental control, and experiments will be needed to quantitatively constrain the effective mean-field interaction parameters appearing in the theory and thereby define the accessible regions of the phase diagram.
High-sensitivity measurements of the microwave electric field are important in applications of communication and metrology. The sensitivity of traditional Rydberg superheterodyne receivers in free space is effectively determined by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is often considered equivalent to sensitivity in practical sensing applications. In this work, we demonstrate a cavity-enhanced receiver, where an optical cavity significantly amplifies the interaction between the probe light and cesium atoms, which substantially improves the signal-to-noise ratio via enhancing the expansion coefficient κ . Here, κ is the edge slope of the single peak obtained by fitting the double-peak EIT-AT spectrum, characterizing the response of the probe light to the frequency detuning of the coupling laser. The sensitivity is thus boosted by a factor of approximately 19 dB. This study highlights the pivotal role of optical cavities in advancing Rydberg-based detection systems, offering a promising approach for high-sensitivity microwave electric field measurements.
Far-from-equilibrium dynamics that lead to self-organization are highly relevant to complex dynamical systems not only in physics but also in life, earth, and social sciences.However, it is challenging to find systems with sufficiently controllable parameters that allow quantitatively modeling of emergent properties.Here, we study a nonequilibrium phase transition and observe signatures of self-organized criticality in a dilute thermal vapor of atoms optically excited to strongly interacting Rydberg states.Electromagnetically induced transparency provides excellent control over the population dynamics and enables highresolution probing of the driven-dissipative dynamics, which also exhibits phase bistability.Increased sensitivity compared to previous work allows us to reconstruct the complete phase diagram, including in the vicinity of the critical point.We observe that interaction-induced energy shifts and enhanced decay only occur in one of the phases above a critical Rydberg population.This case limits the application of generic mean-field models; however, a modified, threshold-dependent approach is in qualitative agreement with experimental data.Near threshold, we observe self-organized dynamics in the form of population jumps that return the density to a critical value.
Interacting many-body systems display enhanced sensitivity close to critical transition points due to diverging quantum fluctuations. This criticality-based enhancement has been suggested as a potential resource for applications in precision metrology. Here we demonstrate many-body critical enhanced metrology for the sensing of external microwave electric fields in a non-equilibrium Rydberg atomic gas. We show that small variations in external driving lead to a large variation in the population of Rydberg states around criticality and to a notable change in the optical transmission signal. For continuous optical transmission at the critical point, we quantify the enhanced sensitivity extracting the Fisher information, which shows a three orders of magnitude increase due to many-body effects compared with single-particle systems. These results demonstrate that critical properties of many-body systems are promising resources for sensing and metrology applications. Interacting quantum systems near criticality have been proposed as potential probes for quantum metrology. An experiment with Rydberg atoms now proves the enhanced sensitivity of critical many-body systems to small variations in external parameters.
Highly-excited Rydberg atoms have strong long-range interactions resulting in exotic optical prop erties such as large single photon non-linearities and intrinsic bistability. In this paper we study optical-driven non-equilibrium phase transitions in a thermal Rydberg gas with a sensitivity two order of magnitude higher than in previous work. In this regime we can elucidate the effect of inter actions on the bistable optical response, and exploit different branches in the potential in order to study multi-component Rydberg gases with a rich of phase diagram including overlapping bistable regions. In addition, we study the effect of polarization on the width of the hysteresis loop. Finally, we observe that the medium exhibits a dynamical instability resulting from the competing dynamics of excitation and decay.