Rabi oscillations between ground and Rydberg states and van der Waals blockade in a mesoscopic frozen Rydberg gas

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of our recent observation of synchronous Rabi oscillations between the electronic ground state and Rydberg states in a mesoscopic ensemble containing roughly 100 ultracold atoms [M. Reetz-Lamour \textit{et al.}, submitted, arXiv:0711.4321]. The mesoscopic cloud is selected out of a sample of laser-cooled Rb atoms by optical pumping. The atoms are coupled to a Rydberg state with principal quantum number around 30 by a two-photon scheme employing flat-top laser beams. The influence of residual spatial intensity fluctuations as well as sources of decoherence such as redistribution to other states, radiative lifetime, and laser bandwidth are analysed. The results open up new possibilities for the investigation of coherent many-body phenomena in dipolar Rydberg gases. As an example we demonstrate the van der Waals blockade, a variant of the dipole blockade, for a mesoscopic atom sample.

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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Rabi oscillations and excitation trapping in the coherent excitation of a mesoscopic frozen Rydberg gas
• Coherent Population Trapping with Controlled Interparticle Interactions
• Electromagnetically induced transparency of an interacting cold Rydberg ensemble
• Universal scaling in a strongly interacting Rydberg gas
• Doppler- and recoil-free laser excitation of Rydberg states via three-photon transitions
• Comparison of Gaussian and super Gaussian laser beams for addressing atomic qubits
• Measurement of the electric dipole moments for transitions to rubidium Rydberg states via Autler-Townes splitting
• Finite-size effects in strongly interacting Rydberg gases
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