Rydberg interaction induced enhanced excitation in thermal atomic vapor

Abstract

We present the experimental demonstration of interaction induced enhancement in Rydberg excitation or Rydberg anti-blockade in thermal atomic vapor. We have used optical heterodyne detection technique to measure Rydberg population due to two-photon excitation to the Rydberg state. The anti-blockade peak which doesn’t satisfy the two-photon resonant condition is observed along with the usual two-photon resonant peak which can’t be explained using the model with non-interacting three-level atomic system. A model involving two interacting atoms is formulated for thermal atomic vapor using the dressed states of three-level atomic system to explain the experimental observations. A non-linear dependence of vapor density is observed for the anti-blockade peak which also increases with increase in principal quantum number of the Rydberg state. A good agreement is found between the experimental observations and the proposed interacting model. Our result implies possible applications towards quantum logic gates using Rydberg anti-blockade in thermal atomic vapor.

Digital communication with Rydberg atoms and amplitude-modulated microwave fields

“…However, increasing the atom density to improve SNR or going to higher principal quantum numbers to use lower MW frequencies may lead to complications and increased dephasing from collisional broadening or Rydberg blockade due to dipole-dipole interactions. 30,31 To measure the photon-shot-noise-limited channel capacity we change the measurement scheme to the heterodyne configuration (see Fig. 1(d)).…”

Anomalous excitation enhancement with Rydberg-dressed atoms

“…More recently we note that an enhanced excitation induced by Rydberg interaction in a thermal atomic ensemble is experimentally investigated [50].…”

Atomic interactions for qubit-error compensations

“…This balance occurs in the Rydberg blockade [37], where the interaction is large enough to block the laser excitation to the state |e 1 , e 2 . Viceversa the tuning of those parameters has been used to enhance that excitation as in the ultracold Rydberg atom antiblockade [3,5] or in the Rydberg enhancement of a room temperature vapor [26]. We operate with Rabi frequencies of the laser excitation, much larger than the interaction V , where the above processes should not occur.…”