Investigation of cold Rb Rydberg atoms in a magneto-optical trap

Abstract

We present our results on the experiments with cold Rb Rydberg atoms in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). Characteristic features of our experiment were the excitation of Rydberg atoms in a small volume within the cold atom cloud and sorting of the measured signals and spectra over the number of registered Rydberg atoms. We have measured the effective lifetime of the Rydberg state 37P, as well as its polarizability in a weak electric field. The results are in good agreement with the theoretical calculations. We have shown that localization of the small excitation volume around the zero-magnetic-field point makes possible to increase the spectral resolution and to obtain narrow microwave resonances in Rydberg atoms without switching off the MOT quadrupole magnetic field. We have measured the dependence of the amplitude of the dipole-dipole interaction resonances on the number of Rydberg atoms, which has a linear character and agrees with the theory for weak dipole-dipole interaction.

9 pages, 6 figures. To appear in JETP, 2009. Typo in eq.(7) corrected in v2

References in corpus (6)

• Electric-field induced dipole blockade with Rydberg atoms
• Spectroscopic observation of resonant electric dipole-dipole interactions between cold Rydberg atoms
• Applicability of Rydberg atoms to quantum computers
• Ionization of Sodium and Rubidium nS, nP and nD Rydberg atoms by blackbody radiation
• Resonant electric dipole-dipole interactions between cold Rydberg atoms in a magnetic field
• Effect of finite detection efficiency on the observation of the dipole-dipole interaction of a few Rydberg atoms

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Dipole blockade in a cold Rydberg atomic sample
• Controlling the interactions of a few cold Rb Rydberg atoms by radiofrequency-assisted Förster resonances
• Effect of photoions on the line shapes of the Förster resonance and microwave transitions in cold rubidium Rydberg atoms
• Observation of the Dipole Blockade Effect in Detecting Rydberg Atoms by the Selective Field Ionization Method
• Red- and blue-detuned magneto-optical trapping with liquid crystal variable retarders