Rabi oscillations and excitation trapping in the coherent excitation of a mesoscopic frozen Rydberg gas

Abstract

We demonstrate the coherent excitation of a mesoscopic ensemble of about 100 ultracold atoms to Rydberg states by driving Rabi oscillations from the atomic ground state. We employ a dedicated beam shaping and optical pumping scheme to compensate for the small transition matrix element. We study the excitation in a weakly interacting regime and in the regime of strong interactions. When increasing the interaction strength by pair state resonances we observe an increased excitation rate through coupling to high angular momentum states. This effect is in contrast to the proposed and previously observed interaction-induced suppression of excitation, the so-called dipole blockade.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Evidence for coherent collective Rydberg excitation in the strong blockade regime
• Survival Probabilities in Coherent Exciton Transfer with Trapping
• Rabi oscillations between ground and Rydberg states and van der Waals blockade in a mesoscopic frozen Rydberg gas

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• Dressing of Ultracold Atoms by their Rydberg States in a Ioffe-Pritchard Trap
• Competition between Factors Determining Bright versus Dark Atomic States within a Laser Mode