Dressed states are eigenstates of the full Hamiltonian which also includes the interaction of the atoms with the driving field. From this point of view, photons of the field interacting with the atom externally induce quantum coherence, and thus modify the inherent properties of atomic system, such as Mollow triplets in the resonance fluorescence spectrum. Because of the rigorous requirement on the ratio of driving strength to the intrinsic linewidth, the associated demonstrations in neutral atoms are restricted to optical dressing in a cavity quantum electrodynamics system and microwave dressing in the Rydberg excitation. Here, we report the realization of coherent dressing of a ground state driven by a radio-frequency magnetic field in an antirelaxation coated warm vapor cell. We reveal the properties of the radio-frequency dressed states, a linear scaling in the resonance splitting, and the improved resonance linewidth. Such a system is robust to the variation of detection frequency and atom number and is able to determine the driving frequency. It thus may emerge as a unique and versatile tool in quantum metrology, for instance, rf atomic magnetometry in a large detection frequency range. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Dressed states are eigenstates of the full Hamiltonian which also includes the interaction of the atoms with the driving field. From this point of view, photons of the field interacting with the atom externally induce quantum coherence, and thus modify the inherent properties of atomic system, such as Mollow triplets in the resonance fluorescence spectrum. Because of the rigorous requirement on the ratio of driving strength to the intrinsic linewidth, the associated demonstrations in neutral atoms are restricted to optical dressing in a cavity quantum electrodynamics system and microwave dressing in the Rydberg excitation. Here, we report the realization of coherent dressing of a ground state driven by a radio-frequency magnetic field in an antirelaxation coated warm vapor cell. We reveal the properties of the radio-frequency dressed states, a linear scaling in the resonance splitting, and the improved resonance linewidth. Such a system is robust to the variation of detection frequency and atom number and is able to determine the driving frequency. It thus may emerge as a unique and versatile tool in quantum metrology, for instance, rf atomic magnetometry in a large detection frequency range. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Periodically driven systems, so-called Floquet systems, exhibit novel and exotic phases of matters inaccessible in static counterparts. The associated flexibility offered by Floquet engineering has helped gain insight into synthetic dimensions of quantum systems, non-equilibrium dynamics, and topology. Here, we apply the technique of Floquet engineering to the coherent dressing of spin states, aiming to provide a new dimension in the spin manipulation. We use an anti-relaxation coated 87 Rb vapor cell interacting with a transverse radio-frequency magnetic field, which is resonant with the Larmor precession and excites the coherence between adjacent Zeeman sublevels. The narrow linewidth of the natural resonance promises the successful observation of a radio-frequency dressed spin state via electromagnetically induced transparency spectroscopy. In this configuration, we create a Floquet system by adding a longitudinal oscillating magnetic field to periodically drive Zeeman levels. We experimentally observe the Floquet engineered coherent dressing spectroscopy, featuring a series of sidebands in frequency space with weight factor in terms of Bessel function, as expected by our theoretical model. Our method can be applied to coherent dressed states of natural and artificial atoms, offering the possibilities of quantum bit control and quantum sensing.
We demonstrate the accurate determination of the magnetic strength of a microwave field utilizing the dressed cesium atom as a sensor. A bias magnetic field is initially used to split the Zeeman levels of the ground state. Its value is carefully selected to ensure that the microwave field to be measured is closely resonant to a pair of selected hyperfine Zeeman levels ( | F = 3 , m F = 3 ⟩ and | F = 4 , m F = 4 ⟩ ), while other states are neglected. This approach significantly simplifies the interaction model. A weak radio-frequency magnetic field is utilized to drive atoms away from the specified magnetic quantum number state to its neighbor, whose population imbalance is supervised by optical readout. The long atomic transverse relaxation time due to the antirelaxation coatings of alkali-metal-vapor cells makes it possible to precisely depict the interaction between atoms and the microwave field. Consequently, the microwave field can be accurately determined with an uncertainty of less than 1% even beyond 100 nT, corresponding to a radio-frequency spectral line broadening less than 100 Hz. The features we have identified enable us to expand the possibilities of developing new metrology for measuring microwave fields in an alternative way.
The eigenstates of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian (the dressed atomic states) are widely used to describe the interaction between a single two-level atom and a single mode of the electromagnetic field. They provide a particularly useful basis when the secular approximation is justified. For an atom interacting fog with n photons in a cavity, the secular approximation requires that the n-photon Rabi frequency 2 n g be much larger than the atomic and cavity linewidths. Normally this condition is met when n is large and the coupling constant g is much smaller than the atomic and cavity linewidths. In this paper we allow g to be larger than the linewidths, and we allow the photon number to be small. We show that when the cavity is driven by a coherent field, the usual secular approximation cannot be used. The natural basis states become are now the eigenstates of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian plus the external field interaction. We solve this eigenvalue problem by separating the field and atomic parts of the Hamiltonian using a displacement and squeeze in the Hilbert-space of the field. We find that the Rabi frequencies are renormalized downwards as the strength of the driving field is increased. They eventually vanish at a critical field strength. At this critical field strength we observe a spontaneous symmetry breaking in the steady-state solution of the master equation for a single atom interacting with a driven cavity mode.
Advances in the coherent control of Rydberg atoms have led to an explosion in their use in a wide range of topics, including quantum computation, simulation, sensing, and networking. More specifically, Rydberg-coupled ensembles of atoms interfaced with a single mode of light have enabled studies of fundamental light-matter interactions at the single-photon level and have emerged as a promising platform to realize scalable quantum networking nodes. In the first part of this thesis, we utilize Rydberg blockade to generate large ensembles that host a single Rydberg excitation and use the collective state as a resource to efficiently generate single photons. We further investigate the shelving of the collective Rydberg excitations to the ground-state manifold, where we observe an order of magnitude increase in the coherence time of the excitation. In the latter half of the thesis, we use near-resonant microwave fields to generate microwave-dressed Rydberg states, where we utilize the degrees of freedom of the microwave field to tune the strength, form, and angular dependence of the dipole-dipole interactions. To this end, we develop a robust and highly tunable microwave polarization control system. We use a set of in-vacuum electrodes as microwave antennas. We measure the microwave polarizations produced by each source at the positions of the atoms using a Rydberg EIT-based polarimetry technique. By characterizing the three imperfect sources, we find the control settings necessary to produce \sigma_-, \pi, and \sigma_+ polarized microwaves with >99 % fidelity. We extend our purification techniques to frequencies away from Rydberg resonances by utilizing an auxiliary microwave field, generating two-photon microwave resonances. The high-fidelity microwave polarizations are used to resonantly admix opposite-parity Rydberg states, generating dressed states with dipole-dipole interactions that are longer range and stronger than the bare van der Waals interactions. To characterize the strength of the interactions, we measure the photon-number statistics of the light generated by the ensemble of atoms. By varying the cloud length relative to the blockade radii, we demonstrate a clear enhancement of the interaction strength due to microwave dressing. Our platform enables further engineering of interactions by exploiting the polarization and frequency degrees of freedom of the microwave fields, opening pathways for new quantum control strategies in many different experimental platforms.
Interacting ultracold atomic quantum gases provide an ideal test bed to study strongly correlated quantum matter. The interactions between atoms in such an ultracold quantum gas are typically short-ranged and well described by an effective contact potential. Introducing longer-range interactions promises the realization of novel quantum phases which are absent in systems with only short-range interactions. Trapped atoms, resonantly laser-coupled to highly excited, strongly interacting Rydberg states have been proposed as a versatile platform to realize such long-range interacting quantum matter. In a first experiment presented in this thesis, we combined the single-atom-sensitive local preparation and detection enabled by a quantum gas microscope to prepare and microscopically characterize an ensemble of rubidium-87 atoms trapped in an optical lattice in the regime of strong Rydberg blockade. There, we observe collectively enhanced optical coupling in an effective two-level system, the so-called “superatom”, and infer the presence of entanglement. Detuned optical coupling to Rydberg states, termed “Rydberg dressing”, has been proposed as an alternative approach to induce long-range interactions. Rather than directly exciting an atom to a Rydberg state, the properties of the latter are admixed to a ground state, which consequently acquires long-range interactions. In the context of this thesis, we have designed a laser system in the ultraviolet spectral range to admix Rydberg P-state character to the ground state of atoms in an optical lattice. In an emerging Ising quantum magnet, the presence of Rydberg-dressed interactions was demonstrated by an interferometric technique combined with spatially resolved spin correlation measurements. The theoretically predicted tunability of the isotropy and range of the interaction were confirmed experimentally. While these initial measurements exhibited unexpected dissipation, in a subsequent experiment in a one-dimensional spin chain this dissipation was overcome. We substantiated the improved coherence times by tracking the time evolution of the magnetization upon suddenly switching on interactions and observing coherent collapse and revival dynamics, one of the hallmarks of coherent quantum evolution. Our results establish Rydberg-dressed interactions in ultracold gases and pave the way to realize and study novel exotic quantum phases.
We investigate the features of the spontaneous emission spectra in a coherently driven cold five-level atomic system by means of a radio frequency (rf) or microwave field driving a hyperfine transition within the ground state. It is shown that a few interesting phenomena such as spectral-line narrowing, spectral-line enhancement, spectral-line suppression, and spontaneous emission quenching can be realized by modulating the frequency and intensity of the rf-driving field in our system. In the dressed-state picture of the coupling and rf-driving fields, we find that this coherently driven atomic system has three close-lying levels so that multiple spontaneously generated coherence (SGC) arises. Our considered atomic model can be found in real atoms, such as rubidium or sodium, so a corresponding experiment can be done to observe the expected phenomena related to SGC reported by Fountoulakis et al. [Phys. Rev. A 73, 033811 (2006)], since no rigorous conditions are required.