van der Waals explosion of cold Rydberg clusters

Faoro, R.; Simonelli, Cristiano; Archimi, Matteo; Masella, G.; Valado, María Martínez; Arimondo, E.; Mannella, R.; Ciampini, Donatella; Morsch, O.

doi:10.1103/physreva.93.030701

Cited by 35 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The de-excitation resonances for those two classes of atoms should, therefore, be centred around ∆ = ∆ ex and ∆ = 2∆ ex , respectively. Furthermore, due to the residual thermal motion of the atoms (and also the van der Waals repulsion [21][22][23]) the distances between the atoms will increase over time, so that eventually each atom will have a de-excitation resonance at ∆ = 0 as the interactions decrease. We test the above picture by off-resonantly exciting around N in = 20 atoms at ∆ ex = 2π × 16 MHz using a 5 µs excitation pulse.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deexcitation spectroscopy of strongly interacting Rydberg gases

et al. 2017

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present experimental results on the controlled de-excitation of Rydberg states in a cold gas of Rb atoms. The effect of the van der Waals interactions between the Rydberg atoms is clearly seen in the de-excitation spectrum and dynamics. Our observations are confirmed by numerical simulations. In particular, for off-resonant (facilitated) excitation we find that the de-excitation spectrum reflects the spatial arrangement of the atoms in the quasi one-dimensional geometry of our experiment. We discuss future applications of this technique and implications for detection and controlled dissipation schemes.Cold atoms excited to high-lying Rydberg states have become a thriving field of research in recent years. Their strong and widely tunable interactions make them an attractive and versatile platform for studying a range of many-body phenomena such as collective excitations [1,2] and spatial ordering [3], and for classical and quantum simulations of, e.g., glassy systems and percolation [4][5][6][7][8][9]. Typically, in such experiments Rydberg states are excited starting from a cold or Bose-condensed cloud of ground-state atoms, and the ensuing dynamics is then studied using field ionization techniques or controlled depumping to the ground state [3,10]. Whereas the number of ground-state atoms is usually on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands, only a few to tens of Rydberg excitations are created in most experiments. The Rydberg blockade, whereby an excited atom suppresses further excitations within a volume defined by a blockade radius r b , and the facilitation mechanism, which favours excitations inside a shell at a well-defined distance r f ac in the case of off-resonant excitation, both restrict the number of excitations possible in an atomic cloud to a small fraction of the total number of atoms contained in it. Nevertheless, in order to fully describe the excitation dynamics, theoretical treatments and numerical simulations need to take into account all the atoms in the cloud, particularly so in the coherent excitation regime, where the van der Waals interaction between Rydberg atoms leads to collective effects.Here we present experimental results and numerical simulations of the reverse process, i.e., a controlled deexcitation of a cold Rydberg gas induced by resonantly coupling the Rydberg state to a short-lived intermediate state that decays to the ground state. We perform experiments in different regimes, ranging from noninteracting to strongly interacting, and we show that since only excited atoms are involved, the dynamics of the de-excitation process allows a much simpler description and permits studies of interaction effects that are complementary to the conventional experiments starting from ground-state atoms. Our method can be used as a sensitive tool for probing the spatio-temporal evolution of an interacting Rydberg gas. We also point out possible consequences for depumping-based detection protocols and for controlled dissipation schemes.In our experiments we create small clouds of cold...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deexcitation spectroscopy of strongly interacting Rydberg gases

et al. 2017

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such works explore different aspects of condensed matter physics: i) transition to the crystalline phase [19,20]; ii) energy transport [21]; iii) spatial correlations [22]; iv) Rydberg aggregates [23]; v) van der Waals interaction and Rydberg blockade effect [24][25][26]. Clearly, Rydberg atoms can be used as a prototype for the study of such complex properties because they are a simpler system and easier to control.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Control of Rydberg-atom blockade by dc electric-field orientation in a quasi-one-dimensional sample

Gonçalves

Marcassa

2016

Phys. Rev. A

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Inside the shell, the Rydberg repulsion compensates the detuning in Eq. (3), yielding an effective resonant excitation rate κ t ≈ Ω 2 t /Γ with κ t τ t [47][48][49][50][51]. In the limit of strong dephasing, the atom coherences decay rapidly in time and the relevant dynamical degrees of freedom are the Rydberg state density and the density of 'active' states, i.e., of atoms in the Rydberg and in the ground state.…”

Section: Facilitated Rydberg Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling excitation avalanches in driven Rydberg gases

Klocke

Buchhold

2019

Phys. Rev. A

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent experiments with strongly interacting, driven Rydberg ensembles have introduced a promising setup for the study of self-organized criticality (SOC) in cold atom systems. Based on this setup, we theoretically propose a control mechanism for the paradigmatic avalanche dynamics of SOC in the form of a time-dependent drive amplitude. This gives access to a variety of avalanche dominated, self-organization scenarios, prominently including self-organized criticality, as well as sub-and supercritical dynamics. We analyze the dependence of the dynamics on external scales and spatial dimensionality. It demonstrates the potential of driven Rydberg systems as a playground for the exploration of an extended SOC phenomenology and their relation to other common scenarios of SOC, such as e.g., in neural networks and on graphs.

show abstract

van der Waals explosion of cold Rydberg clusters

Cited by 35 publications

References 31 publications

Deexcitation spectroscopy of strongly interacting Rydberg gases

Deexcitation spectroscopy of strongly interacting Rydberg gases

Control of Rydberg-atom blockade by dc electric-field orientation in a quasi-one-dimensional sample

Controlling excitation avalanches in driven Rydberg gases

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About